Noz Nozawa’s lighting fixtures are quite literally jewelry for interiors.

Noz Nozawa, 38, always wanted to be a designer—“even before I knew it was a thing,” she says. But guided by her pragmatic Japanese American father and Chinese mother, she pursued a steadier path. After earning a Wharton business degree and starting a marketing career at Clorox in Oakland, Nozawa finally surrendered to her creative instincts.

At Houzz, where she managed marketing, she met interior designers who had switched careers to follow their passions. “They told me they had no formal training,” she recalls. “That gave me courage.” In 2014, she made the leap to interior design. “I’ve become known for bold color,” she says. “Clients ask me to take them outside their comfort zones.”

Her 1,200-square-foot Hayes Valley apartment doubles as a laboratory of color, pattern, and form—much of it spilling into her Instagram feed. Now, as a member of SFMOMA’s Architecture + Design Accessions Committee, Nozawa has also emerged as an industrial designer.

In 2020, Hudson Valley Lighting Group invited her to design a lighting line. “I turned it down,” she admits. “I didn’t have a compelling idea.” When the offer came again in 2022, this time for their brand Corbett, whose refined metals spoke to her, inspiration struck.

“I’ve always collected jewelry,” says Nozawa, who has cast her own cire-perdue gold pieces. “I realized I could make jewelry for a room.”

Still, translating small adornments into large fixtures demanded reinvention. “Everything I drew was too heavy or too expensive scaled up,” she says. “And setting a stone in a ring is nothing like mounting one in a lamp—you have to think about screws.” Working with Hudson’s engineers, she adapted gilded tubing and lightweight metals to achieve her luminous, balanced designs.

That collaboration became a crash course in product design. “Even my Clorox experience with injection-molded bottles helped me understand manufacturing feedback,” she says.

Nozawa’s Corbett collection—Bezel, Daith, Riviere, Zeme, Tragus and Lariat—reimagines pendants, chandeliers, and sconces as jeweled sculpture. Gold-leaf finishes, alabaster and onyx lenses, and fogged glass faceted like cabochons diffuse light into a soft radiance.

Launched in phases since last year after two years of development, the line gleams with craft and personality. Nozawa’s next series, debuting in April, draws inspiration from nature and an equally sensual muse: food.