Tobias Grau was born in Hamburg in 1957.
After studying business management in Munich, Tobias Grau went to New York in 1983 where he attended the Parson School of Design, followed by an internship in the development department of Knoll International in Pennsylvania.
In 1984, Grau started out as a freelance designer in Hamburg with interior design projects for offices, agencies, small companies and fashion firms among others. These interiors also included his own designs for lamps and furniture, which were realized in collaboration with special workshops. It was from this work that Tobias Grau developed his first lamp collection, launched under his own name at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1987. Ever since, the focus of his work has been on the development of new lamps and lighting systems, as well as designing his brand‘s catalogues, shops and fair stands.
Besides lamps for the home, he began designing an increasing number of lamps for commercial projects, particularly office lighting. The first such lamps were launched in 2002. The GO XT line was added to the collection in 2006.
The most famous lamps in the Tobias Grau collection include Tai, Bill, George, Soon, Oh China. The lamps have won numerous design awards, including the Baden-Württemberg International Design Award in gold, the Baden-Württemberg International Design Award in silver, the Red Dot Design Award „best of the best“, the iF Product Design Award in gold, the iF Product Design Award in silver and the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany in gold.
Tobias Grau’s newest designs are the switch program XT PLUG&DIM, lamps with LED and energy saving bulbs for the technical and home areas as well as a new shade-lamps programme.
More and more Tobias Grau concentrates on interior architecture, this means that the design of holistic office concepts – from the room program over carpets and furniture up to the light. One of the projects was the furnishing and illumination of the Astratum in Hamburg with 18 floors.
The furniture and carpets program Table and Carpet TG1 emerged out of that work.
Website by Tobias Grau
Auerberg