Mary Welch & Jeremy Pyles, Glass Visionaries

Husband-and-wife team Jeremy Pyles, 35, and Mary Welch, 31, of Niche Modern are creating some of America's funkiest new lighting designs. Frustrated with lighting options for their Manhattan home-furnishings shop, Niche, they created a hand-blown pendant in 2003. "Stamen" (above) became the store's most coveted item, and in 2005 they debuted a line of 10 lights, in shapes from flattened spheres to bell jars. Influential restaurant designers are taken with their ingenious touches: Tony Chi, for one, chose "Aurora" to light chef Michael Mina's new Stonehill Tavern in Dana Point, California. Recently the couple teamed with a Singaporean father-daughter duo to make gorgeous porcelain vases with star-shaped openings."

 - Food & Wine, November 2006