Dave Dawson, who co-founded the Urban Electric Co., a bespoke lighting manufacturer whose wares have appeared in a panoply of venues around the world, including the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton hotels — as well as the White House — and whose innovative factory helped make Charleston, S.C., a design hub, died on June 30. He was 53.
His wife, Jennifer Dawson, who founded the company with him, announced the death but did not give a cause or location.
The Dawsons knew nothing about manufacturing or the lighting business in 2001, when they moved to Charleston from Silicon Valley in California, where they had been working at software start-ups. He was a corporate lawyer who turned to business development; she worked in marketing.
They were newly married and looking for a change of pace. Charleston beckoned. They found a 19th-century house on Legare Street and began to renovate. But they needed lights — exterior and interior fixtures — and nothing seemed quite right. A design problem morphed into an idea for a business.
Could the Dawsons make the lighting themselves? Should they try? They learned that many of the companies that had been in the lighting business either had moved their manufacturing facilities overseas or had shut down.
“The zeitgeist was that American manufacturing was done,” Mr. Dawson told Business of Home, a trade publication, in 2019. “You could take two different conclusions from that. One is that there’s no market — maybe this is a really bad idea, no one else wants to do it and you should stay away. Or two, there’s an opportunity here.”
In 2002, they bought a small but storied workshop in Charleston from a coppersmith named John Gantt. He had been making gas lanterns for the city’s historical houses for decades and was ready to retire. The Dawsons opened a studio on Upper King Street and began making Gantt designs and selling fixtures from other companies.
An interior designer named Michael Amato was their first customer; soon he became their design director. They couldn’t make fixtures fast enough, so they sold vintage pieces, too. Ms. Dawson’s father, Ronald Peek, a builder, helped with the wiring. Ms. Dawson did the painting. Mr. Amato kept sketching.
They hired artists — jewelers, painters, performers — as well as skilled machinists to make fixtures that were distinctly American and based on 19th-century forms. The designs were essentially traditional, but stripped to their essential elements.
The square lantern became their calling card. One of Mr. Amato’s earliest designs, Chisholm Hall, an elegant square pendant lamp with four candlestick fixtures and filament bulbs — named for a street in Charleston — is still a best seller.
The workshop of four grew to 20, then 60. Today, Urban Electric employs about 350 people across two campuses in what has become, thanks to the company, the city’s design district.
Early on, the Dawsons decided to sell only to the trade — meaning, to design professionals — so they could custom-make their orders. They wooed designers and architects by inviting them to Charleston to tour the factory, an enticing turn-of-the-century brick warehouse in a former Navy yard.
By 2007, they were so well known for their impeccable work that the White House asked them to design fixtures to replace those in the Rose Garden. The fixtures were approved, though never installed, but the design, called the 1600, is now in the company’s permanent line. A few years later, President Barack Obama commissioned a custom fixture for his private residence, a version of a lantern known as the Lillibette, which looks a bit like a pergola in miniature. And in 2021, when the interior designer Sheila Bridges was asked to remake the interiors of One Observatory Circle, the official private residence of the vice president, for Kamala Harris, Ms. Bridges chose three fixtures from the Urban Electric Co., including a graceful four-armed pendant called Crane, for the library.
The mandate for that project was American-made work. “It was one of the easiest choices to go to Urban Electric,” Ms. Bridges said. “It’s American design at its best.”
The company also welcomed collaborations, with the architect Mark Maresca and the designer Steven Gambrel, among others. Mr. Gambrel recalled the thrill of working directly with the people who would be making the fixtures, a rare experience for design professionals.
“When I wasn’t satisfied with the patina of the finish, for example,” Mr. Gambrel said, “Dave would suggest we work directly with the craftsman. He revered them and enabled them to elevate the products to another level by including them in the process.”
He added: “Dave always encouraged everyone to excel and push the limits. When I would draw a new detail on a fixture that was difficult or expensive to manufacture, Dave would say, ‘If you think it’s important, then it is.’”
In 2018, Mr. Dawson created a trade group called Makers Alliance, an organization of like-minded manufacturers creating objects and textiles, and for years he funded the group’s annual summits in Charleston, where they gathered to share experiences and advice.
A year later, he started a magazine, The Current, published annually, that covers the work of designers and artists around the world. Printed on lush paper with ingenious cutouts, inserts and original artwork, it resembles Flair, the lavish and short-lived midcentury magazine created by Fleur Cowles.
It was a quixotic mission: to produce a design magazine, in print, when so many publications had foundered or shuttered completely. At first, Mr. Dawson sent it to design professionals. Now you can buy it for $50 at Barnes & Noble, a few design stores and high-end newsstands.
“He was all about community,” Ms. Bridges said. “Smaller businesses looked to him for help. We are all very siloed in our practices, and he helped bring people together.”
She continued: “He would bring people down to Charleston, host them in his family home. There were tours of the factory — we are all nerds and we love to see the process — and you could see the pride he felt as he walked around the headquarters and addressed everybody by name.”
David Scott Dawson was born on July 1, 1972, in Monmouth County, N.J., one of two children of Margaret Ann (Scott) Dawson and David Dean Dawson, who ran a data and securities company.
He grew up in New Jersey, Texas and North Carolina, and spent summers with his grandmother on a farm in West Virginia. He earned his undergraduate degree at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and a law degree from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg. After practicing law in North Carolina, he moved to Silicon Valley to work for a software start-up with his father and brother. There, he met Jennifer Peek. They married in 2001.
In addition to her, Mr. Dawson is survived by their sons, Jack and James; a brother, Matthew; and his parents.
“We talk all the time about disruptions, whether it’s design centers or magazines,” Mr. Dawson said in 2019. “Those are trends to watch, but makers are in a really good place in that conversation, because we have a fantastic story to tell and we’re producing product that, hopefully, people want.”
He added, “I never believe that as an American company we can go to American clients and say, ‘Hey, I’m an American; you’re an American — buy from me. You understand we’re really expensive and maybe it’s really not worth it, but we’re Americans.’ That doesn’t cut it.”
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