If you drive through the vineyards of Franciacorta in northern Italy, you’ll eventually find a building that doesn’t behave like a factory.
There’s a bronze elephant near the entrance. A gorilla sculpture hiding in the garden. Zen landscapes tucked between production halls. Visitors wander through pathways where architecture and light quietly perform together.
This is the headquarters of SIMES.
And despite the sculptures and the gardens, the company’s story begins in a much simpler place: a small room behind a house, a single lathe, and a man who understood aluminum the way musicians understand rhythm.
A Workshop, a Lathe, and a Curious Idea
In 1957, an Italian craftsman named Egidio Botti started a tiny mechanical workshop behind his home.
Nothing glamorous.
One turning machine.
One milling machine.
And a stubborn desire to build things properly.
For years he machined metal components for other companies. Aluminum parts, precise fittings, the kind of invisible hardware that keeps machines quietly working.
But eventually the world of lighting crept into the workshop.
In the late 1960s, his small business began producing lamp holders and electrical components. Then in 1972 Botti acquired a small company that made waterproof lighting fixtures. They were purely practical objects, the sort you’d find outside factories or warehouses.
Most manufacturers treated those lights like industrial equipment.
Botti saw something else.
He redesigned them using die-cast aluminum. He hid the cables to make the forms cleaner. And then he did something slightly rebellious for a rugged industrial light.
He gave them color.
On January 26, 1973, the company officially took shape under the name S.I.M.E.S.
Società Italiana Materiale Elettrico Stagno.
It wasn’t a poetic name. But the idea behind it was quietly powerful.
Build outdoor lighting that survives everything.
Rain. Dust. Time.
The Eiffel Tower Surprise
For more than a decade, SIMES built a reputation for something rare in manufacturing: reliability.
Their waterproof fixtures simply refused to fail.
Eventually that reputation traveled farther than the vineyards of northern Italy. In 1984, the City of Paris needed durable outdoor fixtures for one of the most famous structures on Earth.
Suddenly, the small Italian company that started in a back room was installing lighting fixtures on the legendary Eiffel Tower.
Not glamorous floodlights.
Not dramatic beams.
Just practical, reliable luminaires quietly doing their job.
It revealed something about the company’s philosophy that still defines it today.
Good lighting doesn’t demand attention.
It lets architecture speak.
When the Second Generation Changed the Direction of Light
In 1990, leadership passed to Egidio’s son, Roberto Botti.
He inherited the company at a moment when outdoor lighting was still mostly predictable: lamps mounted on walls or ceilings, shining downward in obedient cones of brightness.
Roberto had been traveling, particularly in the United States, and he returned with a simple question.
Why must light always come from above?
Gardens, pathways, and public spaces felt completely different when light rose from the ground instead. Trees could glow upward. Buildings could appear to float.
But placing lights in the ground introduces a problem that engineers know too well.
Water.
Roberto’s solution was surprisingly elegant: a recessed housing system that isolated the fixture from the surrounding soil and moisture.
This allowed lighting fixtures to sit flush with the ground while remaining fully protected.
The effect transformed outdoor design.
Pathways began to glow softly from below.
Architecture gained depth at night.
Gardens turned into quiet theatrical stages.
It was one of the moments when SIMES stopped thinking only about fixtures and started thinking about light as part of architecture.
When Designers Entered the Workshop
Around the same time, another transformation began.
In 1986 the company invited architect and designer Pino Spagnolo to collaborate on product design.
It was a small step that changed the company permanently.
Until then, SIMES had built excellent technical products. But design opened the door to something new: emotional lighting.
Over the years, designers began shaping fixtures that were minimal, sculptural, sometimes almost invisible. Many of them were created specifically for architects and landscape designers.
The goal wasn’t to decorate buildings.
It was to let light merge into architecture and disappear.
This philosophy eventually became the company’s guiding principle:
light should exist where it’s needed, and then quietly vanish into the space.
The LED Revolution
By the late 1990s, another transformation swept across the lighting industry.
LED technology arrived.
Instead of resisting the change, SIMES leaned into it early. The company collaborated with OSRAM to develop its first LED products, including early in-ground LED signal lights.
The shift accelerated throughout the 2000s as LEDs became powerful enough for architectural lighting.
Traditional light sources slowly disappeared from the company’s product lines.
LEDs offered something SIMES cared deeply about: precision.
Light could now be directed exactly where designers wanted it, without flooding the environment with unnecessary brightness.
Outdoor lighting began to feel more refined, more controlled, more human.
Light Culture, Not Just Light Fixtures
By 2008 the company redefined its identity.
The new motto became simple and ambitious: “Light for architecture.”
That phrase captured a shift in thinking.
SIMES wasn’t just producing hardware anymore.
It was participating in the culture of architectural lighting.
The headquarters itself became a physical expression of this idea. The site evolved into an open-air showroom filled with art installations, gardens, and demonstration spaces where visitors could experience light interacting with real landscapes and structures.
Employees worked surrounded by design experiments and sculptures.
Visitors walked through living lighting installations.
The entire campus became a quiet laboratory for night.
The Third Generation Arrives
In 2020, a new chapter began.
The third generation of the Botti family stepped into the company, bringing fresh ideas while preserving the values that built the business.
At the same time, SIMES continued pushing technical innovation.
In 2022 the company introduced IP System®, a flexible linear lighting system designed for outdoor and humid environments.
It represented the kind of thinking the company has pursued for decades: solutions that combine durability, simplicity, and architectural freedom.
A Company That Prefers Quiet Success
Today SIMES exports lighting solutions to more than 60 countries and continues to design and manufacture its products in Franciacorta, Italy.
Around 120 people work within the company, developing fixtures that illuminate gardens, public spaces, architecture, and landscapes around the world.
The technology has become sophisticated.
The design collaborations have grown.
But the core idea still feels remarkably similar to the one Egidio Botti followed in his tiny workshop decades ago.
Build things that last.
Design them carefully.
And let the light do the talking. This is what we also believe in Flyachilles.
Because when lighting is done right, people rarely notice the fixtures.
They simply notice how beautiful a place feels after the sun goes down.
