Kate MacNeill, the dynamo talent behind Concord Custom Lighting, a new Toronto design and manufacturing studio, got her start cutting, bending, threading and welding custom luminaires at Commute Home. “At that stage,” she says, “I had no experience with electrical or metal working at all.” That changed when Yoki Milke, who now runs his own lighting studio, Milke Bau, began mentoring her in Commute’s busy west end workshop. She’s a quick study: within five years, the PEI native and graduate of Humber’s Cabinet Making program went from tinkering with wire sockets to coordinating complex lighting orders with local shops and fabricators. “I would be taking a drawing and figuring out the sum of its parts – essentially building myself an Ikea kit. When all was said and done, there might…
