Port Washington, the Walds and the WAC name.

Modern Forms grew up inside a lighting business rather than a fan business. Its home is Port Washington, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, where its parent company, WAC Lighting, issues its press releases; Luxe Interiors + Design, in a partner feature on the brand, also described Modern Forms as “Port Washington-based.” WAC itself says it was founded in 1984 and describes itself as a second-generation, owner-operated company.

The people behind the name are documented in two places. When Kitchen & Bath Business reported on Modern Forms’ new Dallas showroom on 12 February 2018, its photograph identified Tai and Tony Wang as the co-founders of WAC Lighting and Dirk and Shelley Wald as the co-founders of Modern Forms. WAC’s own announcement of 19 April 2021 named Dirk Wald as a co-founder of Modern Forms, as well as of the sister brands dweLED, WAC Landscape, LIMITED and AiSPiRE, and as co-CEO of WAC alongside Shelley Wald. In the Luxe feature, Shelley Wald, then president of WAC Lighting, said plainly that WAC is the parent company of Modern Forms.

That parentage shapes how the brand began. Modern Forms appeared to the trade as a design-led sibling of a technical lighting maker, carrying decorative LED chandeliers, pendants and wall sconces alongside the ceiling fans it would launch in 2018. The Luxe piece described two of the lighting designs: the Catalyst chandelier, a joint-adjustable industrial piece that it likened to a helicopter rotor, and the Kinetic LED fixture, with an openwork globe inspired by a gyroscope and movable arms. “Modern Forms never dips a toe in the water. We love going big,” Wald told the magazine, adding that the newer lighting was bigger and bolder than before to reflect what the luxury design community expected.

Lightovation 2018, Schonbek in 2021, WAC Group today.

The smart fan arrived at a trade show. Kitchen & Bath Business reported that during Lightovation in January 2018, Modern Forms opened a showroom at the Dallas Trade Mart and unveiled a new line of indoor and outdoor smart fans. The report said the fans ran on DC motors, carried integrated LED lighting and used what it called “Adaptive Learning Technology developed by WAC Lighting” to adjust to a household’s routine. They could be controlled from a wall switch or remotely through an app that worked with other smart-home devices. The same show introduced a large collection of LED chandeliers, pendants and sconces under the Modern Forms name. In the Luxe feature, Shelley Wald said that the entire fan line was connected to an easy-to-use app.

The family of brands around Modern Forms grew three years later. On 19 April 2021 WAC announced that it was buying the operating assets of the crystal-chandelier maker Schonbek from Swarovski Lighting, Ltd., with the deal expected to close by the end of June that year. WAC said it would keep Schonbek’s manufacturing plant in Plattsburgh, New York, and use it for made-to-order and custom products across all of its brands, Modern Forms among them.

Today the brands are presented together. The WAC Group website describes the group as “the global identity behind WAC, Modern Forms, and Schonbek,” and says it has offices, factories and partners around the world. The group says it owns every stage of design, engineering and production, a claim it sums up under the heading “Built by us.” Shelley Wald has described WAC as the parent company of Modern Forms, and the Walds are named as the brand’s co-founders.

The fan range has continued to move upmarket. CE Pro reported on 7 May 2026 that WAC Group had introduced a 2026 line of smart ceiling fans under the Modern Forms brand, with new collections called Crown, Carve and Radiant, each with integrated LED lighting, and an Elite Series with dimmable, tunable-white light. The report listed materials including natural Spanish alabaster diffusers, reclaimed crystal elements, wrapped wood accents and rippled acrylic, and said the fans could be run from Bluetooth remotes, wall controls and the MyWAC and Modern Forms apps, with drivers for Control4, Crestron, Lutron and Nice/ELAN systems. Alex Ostrovsky, WAC Group’s executive director of business and product development for smart fans, told the magazine that the fan “becomes part of how the space feels and functions every day.”

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make fireplaces and ceiling fans, two kinds of product that sit at the centre of a room and are chosen as much for how they look as for what they do. Some of the names began as small workshops or family firms and still carry a founder’s name; others now belong to larger home-products or building-products groups, and a single brand can be sold through specialist showrooms, dealers and online retailers at the same time.

Because the company behind a hearth or fan brand may have changed hands, moved its offices or shifted its manufacturing, the name on the product often travels further than the business that first used it. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each one: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fireplaces or fans are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record — newspapers, trade press and official notices — from what the company says about itself, including its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its names, labels and catalogues have changed, and it marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that describes the product.

Modern Forms’ identity begins with its name and with a range that pairs lighting and fans. The 2018 Kitchen & Bath Business report described a launch at the Dallas Trade Mart with a ribbon cutting and a reception for customers and colleagues, and the brand has continued to launch its fans alongside its lighting.

The company’s own website today presents the brand as “Modern Forms Luminaires + Smart Fans,” with menus that sort the range into fans and luminaires, and by style and by space, alongside links to its sister brands WAC Lighting, WAC Architectural and Schonbek. The 2026 CE Pro report described fans finished in alabaster, crystal and wood; the 2018 launch report described apps and learning technology.

For a design guide, Modern Forms shows a fan brand presented side by side with a lighting range, under one name and in one showroom. Compare Big Ass Fans, the Kentucky fan maker, and Fanimation, another decorative fan brand that shows at Lightovation in Dallas. For this guide we use a graphite, a brass and an alabaster white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Modern Forms’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.