About Us

We're Maciej and Aleks — a two-person team running Illumi Maps out of a 100 square foot spare bedroom in our basement in Peachland, BC. Small operation, big obsession.

Maps have been part of my life long before Illumi Maps existed. Back in Poland, I was deep into orienteering — navigation races through forests and fields, on foot, on bicycle, in the car. Sometimes in winter. Sometimes at night. Sometimes at night in winter, with a map deliberately mirrored to make it harder. When Aleks and I met, it didn't take long before she got pulled into it too. Turns out she was just as crazy as me — she just didn't know it yet.

That love of maps never really went away. These days, when life slows down enough to breathe, you'll find us unwinding over a game of GeoGuessr, trying to place a random street view somewhere on the planet from nothing but visual clues. Old habits.

After years of moving — between Poland, Croatia, and eventually Canada — we found something in the Okanagan that made us stop looking. The valley has this quality that's hard to name: dramatic topography, a long winding lake with a silhouette you'd recognize anywhere, and a landscape that seems almost designed to be looked at from above. We moved to Peachland a few years ago and decided this was home.

That's when the idea started. The Okanagan is what we'd call mapogenic — it just looks incredible in map form. Every contour line tells a story. Every lake inlet and ridge has a shape worth celebrating. We wanted to make something that captured that, something tactile and local that people could take home or give as a gift that actually meant something.

So we started cutting. Laser-cut wood and acrylic, maps of the places people love most in this valley. One idea at a time — because there are always more ideas than hours in the day, and that's exactly how we like it.