Design Days came back this May, and we came back with it: eleven lamps, three ladders, two crates of brass we were probably not meant to carry by hand. The hall they gave us was a north-lit concrete room with a ceiling that ate every sound. We had two days to build it. On the third morning the doors opened, and the space had stopped being a shell.

What we hung, and how low

We set the pieces lower than a showroom would, lower than our own drawings asked — near enough that visitors walked into the glow instead of tilting their heads back at it. Daylight arrived cool and even through the tall windows; our light arrived warm and directional. Where the two met on the pale plaster there was a soft edge, and people kept stopping on that edge without knowing why. We never planned it. The light does some of the planning.

• A small brass table piece on a low plinth, throwing a coin of gold onto the concrete.
• The hand-beaten wall disc, mounted at shoulder height so the hammer marks caught the north light sideways.
• Three opal pendants in a slow row, dimmed to just above candle, hanging over a bench we invited people to sit on.

Four days of visitors

The bench was the accident that worked. Someone sat down on the first afternoon and stayed twenty minutes; after that it was never empty. Interior designers came with tape measures and questions about the diameter of the disc. Students came with sketchbooks and stayed for the dimmer. A woman arrived twice, on the Wednesday and again on the Saturday, and the second time she simply stood under the pendants for a while and said nothing at all. That is the only review we have ever wanted.

“You brought a wall. That was the best thing in the room.”

— a visitor, Saturday afternoon

We closed on the Sunday evening, packed the crates, swept the concrete and left the room empty again for a few hours before the next build moved in. Eleven lamps went out; four of them are now in homes we will never see. Light in a hall is temporary. What it does to a person lasts longer.