A study in slowness, lineage, and light.

Burcu Erdal's path to lighting began far from it. She graduated from Yıldız Technical University's Restoration programme, where she learned to read the memory held inside old walls. She continued at Doğuş University, completing her Interior Architecture degree with honours, before pursuing a Master's in Architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University — one of Turkey's most demanding schools of design.

Today she is a PhD candidate at the same institution, researching the intersection of craft, space, and the ethics of making. For over fifteen years she has practised, taught, and restored. She currently lectures at several universities in Istanbul, where she asks her students the same question she asks herself: what does a room owe to the hands that made it?

The first lamp was made for a client's reading corner — a small, deep-bordeaux paisley shade, hand-pleated over an evening at her kitchen table. She didn't intend to make another. Then a friend asked. Then a friend of a friend.

Penah, in old Turkish, means refuge — the place a thing returns to when the world becomes too much. The name arrived before the brand did.

Today Burcu works from a small atelier above a courtyard in Istanbul, alongside artisans who share her patience. She does not take more commissions than the season can hold. She does not promise speed.

Each piece begins with a fabric chosen by hand — often vintage, sometimes saved for years before the right form arrives. From there, it is drawn, framed, pleated, fringed, and finally lit. The process is the same one her grandmother might have recognised.

Burcu's world extends well beyond lamplight. She is involved in theatre — both as a practitioner and a student of its spatial language. She exhibits at design fairs, collaborates with her university students on experimental projects, and continues her doctoral research into the relationship between craft and architectural memory.

Penah Design is not a business she built in isolation. It is the natural extension of a life spent studying how spaces hold meaning — and how the objects inside them can carry that meaning forward.