In the week before the winter solstice, our workshop finished the last of a very small series. Its name is printed in lowercase on a plain white card, and it reads: emergency light. We began the work in early autumn, when the evenings turned cold faster than anyone expected, asking ourselves what a lamp owes you on the hardest nights of the year. The answer turned out to be small. Small enough to hold in one hand.

Made for difficult nights

Emergency light asks for no attention; it simply keeps company. A modest hand-formed shade sits over a warm, low LED, on a weighted base of darkened brass that will not tip on an uneven table, and a single dial turns the glow from reading light down to the faintest ember. In our first years we learned that winter asks little of a lamp and, on the worst nights, everything at once. A blackout. A sleepless child. A late walk home through cold streets. For these hours we made a light you can carry from room to room without thinking.

• Hand-spun shade in warm off-white — no two exactly alike
• Dimmable from a full evening glow down to one candle's worth of light
• Weighted darkened-brass base, steady on any surface
• A cordless version that holds its charge through the longest night

The card, and the first questions

We tie a small white card to everything that leaves the workshop, and we photographed the first of these lamps on an old board of timber that has been with us since our founding. The people who saw the card before the lamp — a bookseller two streets away, the owner of a hardware shop, friends who pass by on cold evenings — kept asking the same question: when can we have one? This first run is only what our hands could finish before the holidays, so it is small, and it is available from the workshop and through our usual stockists. The rest will follow after the new year, when the light starts coming back.

A small light for the long dark. That was the whole brief.