Mash.T Design Studio is a South African designer-maker practice founded in 2016, working across lighting and furniture as a site of inquiry into form, material, and making. The studio cultivates archival gestures by engaging craft lineages and material intelligence as living systems, translating texture and gesture into contemporary objects that exist between the sculptural and the functional.
THE STUDIO MASH.T
Through hands-on manufacturing and close collaboration with master artisans across South Africa, Mash.T develops original designs with layered interpretations—objects shaped as much by memory, process, and technique as by use. The practice approaches making as a critical act, reworking the familiar to invite slower looking and deeper engagement.
Mash.T’s work forms part of the permanent collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Woven Legacies:
The Story Behind the Hlabisa Bench
FOUNDER & OWNER
Owner and founder of Mash.T Design Studio, Thabisa Mjo, is passionate about preserving traditional skills and helping other small businesses. Mjo stumbled into the industry by impulsively entering the Nando’s Hot Young Designer Talent Search competition in 2015. The challenge was to create a pendant light with a contemporary forward-thinking South African twist that could be used in any Nando’s restaurant globally.
To the designer’s delight, the Tutu 2.0 light was announced a winner, and has now been installed in restaurants across the world, from Cape Town to Malaysia, Washington and London. However, for Mjo, who had never designed anything before, the real prize was discovering that she had a gift she had never tapped into.
Mjo has subsequently designed full product ranges and won several awards, thus securing her name as one of the continent’s top design talents. Most recently, Mjo has become the first South African designer to have two of her works, the Tutu Light and Mjojo Cabinet, be installed as part of the permanent collection at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) in the Louvre.
The Hlabisa bench which was produced in collaboration with Houtlander and master weaver Beauty Ngxongo has also been acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE
The materials we work with are chosen with intention.
Our lighting and furniture are made through a combination of hand processes and contemporary manufacturing techniques , and our material choices sit within that intersection. We are interested in what materials can do, how they age, how they are made, what kinds of skills they require, and the histories they carry.
Many of the techniques we use rely on forms of knowledge developed over years of practice. We work with materials that reward time and handling - materials that ask something of the maker and reveal something through process. Our interest lies not only in the finished object, but in the relationship between material, technique, and the people working with it.
Our approach is shaped by an interest in how traditional knowledge and contemporary production can exist alongside one another - not in opposition, but in conversation.
The Team
Every now and then, we revisit a clip of our team fixing a spinning lathe using a soft drink can.
It captures something essential about how we work. Behind every Mash.T piece is a team shaped by skill, patience, problem-solving, and the understanding that making rarely follows a perfectly predictable path.
Our team comprises skillful artisans working alongside emerging makers. The studio functions as a space of apprenticeship, where knowledge is transferred through working together - through repetition, observation, correction, and practice.
What is shared is not only technical skill. It is also a mindset: learning how to respond to challenges, how to work attentively with materials, and how to develop the temperament required to make with consistency and care.
Over time, this process shapes makers who understand that craftsmanship is not only about producing objects, but also about serving the needs of the Conscious Aesthetes - design professionals, architects, and specifiers who use our products to help tell the story of the interiors they design.
The result is a studio grounded in generational artisanship, where making is both a technical practice and a way of thinking.
