One square, a thousand answers

On 17 June we set the Tessera configurator in front of you — online, and on a long table in our showroom, where anyone could lift modules out of a tray and watch a lamp change its mind. The rule we gave ourselves was simple: no option we would not build ourselves. Every combination the table offers, our benches can make.

Tessera began as one square of light. A hand-finished tile, no bigger than a palm, carries a slim LED edge behind a diffuser we polish in two passes. Alone it reads as a small, quiet sconce. Set in a row along a corridor it becomes a line of punctuation marks. Fixed to a ceiling in a wide, loose grid, it stops being a lamp and starts being weather. The range was always there; what was missing was the means to ask for it.

So we made the asking easier. The configurator holds four questions, and the answers multiply:

• Modules — one, two, four, nine, or a field of up to a thousand on a shared driver.
• Finish — brushed brass, deep bronze, or chalk-white enamel, each one brushed and sealed by hand.
• Light — three warm temperatures, all dimmable down to a candle's worth of glow.
• Mounting — surface, recessed, or suspended on cable, with the plate cut to the wall you measure.

Because each tile is finished one at a time, the lead time barely moves with the size of the order. A single Tessera and a ceiling of nine hundred travel the same route through the workshop, only in different numbers of crates. Our bench fitters noticed this first. "You stop counting lamps," one of them told us in the week we opened the table. "You start counting squares."

The response has come faster than we expected. Within a fortnight we had requests for tessellated ceilings in stairwells, for single units as bedside lights, and — our favourite so far — for three squares of graded size running up a wall like a sentence. We will build them all. One, two, a thousand. The hand does not care how many.