Museum reproductions, birdhouses and hand-forged iron.

Currey & Company is a lighting and furniture company based in Atlanta, Georgia. It began in 1988, and its first trade was in the garden rather than the house. The design podcast Kandrac & Kole, introducing an interview with the company’s chief executive in March 2020, said that his parents, Robert Currey and his wife, had started the business in 1988 as “a purveyor of historic garden furnishings”.

The online design marketplace Chairish, in its maker profile of the company, fills in the early details. It says the business was founded in Atlanta under the name Garden Source Furniture, and that it originally concentrated on reproducing garden-furniture designs from the Winterthur Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. To round out that range, Chairish says, the founder, whom it names as Robert B. Currey, also sourced outdoor pieces such as fountains, birdhouses and hand-forged iron lighting.

That iron lighting turned out to be the seed of the later business. According to the same profile, the company changed its name in the 1990s from Garden Source Furniture to Currey and Company, as it turned its attention to interior decor and, above all, to lighting. The new name swapped a description of the product for the family name, and the company has traded under it since, written with an ampersand as Currey & Company.

The garden beginnings remain part of how the company is described by others. Chairish writes of a history in garden architecture and of furniture in which outdoor influences show, such as lattice-backed chairs, and it notes that wrought iron has stayed a favourite material.

A wholesale maker and importer with showrooms at the trade markets.

By 2020 the company described in the Kandrac & Kole show notes was a wholesale manufacturer of lighting, furniture and accent pieces, whose products were used in residential, contract and hospitality interiors. The notes named Brownlee Currey, the founders’ son, as chief executive, and said the company was headquartered in Atlanta.

The same notes give a picture of where the work is done. They said the company employed people across the United States, the Philippines, China and India, and the host asked Brownlee Currey about visiting the company’s factories and about its position “as a manufacturer and importer” at a time of tariffs. In other words, the company was presented as both making and importing its products, with operations in Asia as well as at home.

The trade showroom is a large part of how a wholesale lighting brand meets designers, and the 2020 notes mention three: a showroom in High Point, North Carolina, and recently renovated showrooms in Dallas and Las Vegas. The host singled out the High Point space for its collection of bonsai trees, a hobby of Brownlee Currey’s that visitors to the showroom would see displayed among the furniture and lighting.

The company has also looked abroad. On the Clerkenwell Design Week website in London, a product listing on the stand of the British firm Elstead Lighting presents a Currey & Company pendant, the Maura, with grasscloth cylinder shades on a satin-black frame. The listing describes the piece as designed and made by Currey & Company, “an American company”, and says it is available for the 220–240-volt market through Quintiesse. A second listing there presents cordless table lamps from Currey & Company.

The business that Robert Currey and his wife started in 1988 was led by their son in 2020, as the show notes record.

Design and documentation.

Decorative lighting brands in the United States sit at several different points in the trade. Some began as workshops making fixtures by hand; some are design houses that draw a collection and have it made by factories and artisans elsewhere; some are retailers whose name appears on lamps they commission from others. A single name can be sold through a trade-only showroom, a design-district store, a catalogue and a website at once.

A lighting brand’s identity is usually carried less by one lamp than by a catalogue, a set of finishes, a showroom and the designers whose names appear beside its own. The company behind the name may have changed hands, taken in investors or moved where its fixtures are made since it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fixtures are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its lamps are made and how it presents itself to the trade — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name, an ampersand and a garden in the background.

The Currey & Company identity is built on a family name joined to a word of trade. The company began as Garden Source Furniture, a name that described the goods, and in the 1990s, Chairish says, it became Currey and Company as it moved indoors and towards lighting. The ampersand form, Currey & Company, is the one the company uses on its own website and the one used in its listings at Clerkenwell Design Week.

The second thread is the garden. The business started by reproducing historic garden furniture from the collections of the Winterthur Museum and the Smithsonian Institution and by sourcing fountains, birdhouses and hand-forged iron lighting. Chairish still describes its style as bringing the outdoors in, with lattice backs, wrought iron and natural materials such as seashells in its chandeliers, and the grasscloth shades of the Maura pendant carry the same idea into a modern fixture.

The third thread is the trade. Currey & Company sells wholesale, to designers and to residential, contract and hospitality projects, and it meets that audience in showrooms at the markets in High Point, Dallas and Las Vegas. Chairish names chandeliers and sconces as the core of the range and says its lighting tends towards statement pieces with bold shapes and unexpected materials, with a neo-traditional bent.

The fourth thread is the family. The founders’ son, Brownlee Currey, was chief executive in 2020, and the bonsai collection that the podcast host noticed in the High Point showroom shows how a personal interest can become part of the way a trade brand presents itself to visitors.

For a design guide, Currey & Company shows how a business can keep the memory of its first product — classical garden furniture — in the materials and moods of a later one, and let a family name carry the change. Compare another American lighting house from this series in our Arteriors brand guidelines and a lighting brand with a long design history in our Louis Poulsen brand guidelines. For this guide we use garden moss, gilded brass, grasscloth and wrought iron with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Currey & Company’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.