In the first weeks of spring we cleared a corner of the workshop and set a desk there, close enough to the finishing bench to smell the wax and the warm metal. On it we laid out everything we had been keeping to ourselves: sample plates, off-cuts of brass, a shade that never made it into a collection. This is where made to order begins. From now on a LuminaCraft piece can be built for one particular room, one particular ceiling, one particular way of wanting light.

What you can change

Quite a lot, it turns out. A piece from the collection is a decision we made once, for many rooms. A commissioned piece is a decision you make once, for yours. Most requests land in four places:

• Finish. Brushed, hammered, darkened, or left raw to age. We send sample plates, so you can hold the metal in your own light before we ever touch it.
• Scale. Longer arms, a wider shade, a drop measured to the centimetre of your ceiling.
• Light. Warmer or cooler, brighter or softer, diffused or bare. The same form can whisper or speak.
• Detail. Cable length, canopy shape, the way a switch sits under the hand.

How the work runs

You send us the room: a plan, a photograph, a handful of numbers. We answer with samples and a drawing, and we tell you plainly what the form will and will not allow. Then the piece goes to the same hands that build our collections. There is no separate room for commissions. It is the same workshop, listening longer.

We spent years deciding what our light should look like. Now we would rather ask what yours should.

The first requests came sooner than we expected. A reading room that wanted less glare and more warmth. A staircase of an awkward height, where a standard drop would have hung like a stranger. A table long enough for twelve, and a client who asked us to leave the copper unlacquered so it would darken with the years. Each arrived as a question about light and left as an object. We built them all by hand, and we learned something in every one.

Commissions take longer than a piece from the collection: a few weeks, sometimes a season, depending on the metal and the number of parts. We would rather say that plainly than offer a date we cannot keep. What we can offer is this. The object that arrives will fit your room the way a sentence fits the thought behind it. Light keeps the shape you give it.