The workshop

Light leaves through four layers.

There are four things between the bulb and the wall, and each one does something to the light. Making a lamp is setting those four in order.

A lamp in cross-section: the bulb at the centre, the cast wall around it, the sanded surface outside that. 2700 K 2.4 mm matt
One lamp, cut through.

Inside out

  1. The source

    An E27 fitting and a 2700K bulb, dimmable, included. The fitting is deliberately the most ordinary part of the lamp — in ten years a replacement should be a trip to any hardware shop rather than an email to us.

    2700 K · ~400 lm · E27

  2. The wall

    Resin, cast at 2.4 millimetres. This number decides how much light the lamp gives more than the bulb does: thinner and the bulb shows through as a shadow, thicker and the light is smothered — the lamp reads as switched off while it is switched on.

    It is the one measurement we will not vary between collections. The colour changes, the shape changes, the wall does not.

    2.4 mm, cast in short runs

  3. The surface

    The seam is sanded back by hand and left matt. This is where the shadow on your wall is decided: a gloss surface returns the light from one point and draws a hard edge, a matt one scatters it and the shadow ends softly.

    Sanded to 1200, left matt

  4. The room

    The last layer is not ours. Around 400 lumens lights a corner, a bedside, or a shelf — it is not a replacement for a ceiling fixture and does not try to be. Two small sources in a room beat one large one at every hour after dark.

    Bedside · corner · shelf

The scale, and where we sit on it

1800 KCandle
2700 KA room in the eveningEvery piece
3000 KWarm white
3500 KNeutral
4000 KAn office
5000 KDaylight
6500 KAn overcast sky

Left to right the room gets larger and colder. Past the middle it is working light rather than evening light — which is why every piece here is one number and not a choice.

At the bench

Stage 01 — six hours curing

Casting

Resin goes into the mould at the wall thickness above and cures overnight. Runs are twenty; larger than that and the mould holds its heat, the wall drifts, and the last pieces of the batch are not the first ones.

What it decides

How much light gets out. Everything after this stage adjusts the light — this stage sets how much there is to adjust.

Stage 02 — twenty minutes

Pigment

Colour is weighed rather than judged by eye. When two batches of the same colour come out different they stay separate instead of being mixed — the difference is invisible alone and obvious side by side.

What it decides

Nothing about the light, which is the point. The colour changes in the body and not in the beam: all four collections stay at 2700K.

Stage 03 — forty minutes by hand

Sanding

The seam is taken from 400 to 1200 by hand and left matt. There is no shortcut here: a machine takes the seam out and flattens the form along with it.

What it decides

Whether the shadow on your wall ends hard or soft. Gloss returns the light from a point and draws an edge; matt scatters it.

Stage 04 — no instrument

Held to a wall

Every lamp is switched on and held sixty centimetres from a plain wall before it is packed. Three out of a run of twenty go back at this point.

The part that is not measured

A lamp can measure correctly and still be wrong in a room, and there is no instrument for that. This is the stage that takes the time.

Set all four, and it becomes a lamp.

See the collections

Four shapes

Four answers to the same question.

Every collection is a different decision about where light should go once it leaves the bulb. Drawn side by side, the four stop being styles and start being arguments.