The Aureole looks like the easiest thing we make. One ring, bent by hand, the light hidden behind it, a cord that disappears into the ceiling. For years we believed the difficulty lived at the bench: in the brass, the file, the slow polish that takes a soldered seam out of sight. Then we began hanging the ring in rooms that were not ours, and we found that a good part of the making happens somewhere else entirely. Five rooms taught us the rest. None of them were showrooms.

Rooms one to three

The first was a hallway with a ceiling lower than our test rig. Hung at the height we always use, the ring read as an object in the way, a disc of metal you ducked under. Two centimetres higher and it became light again. The second room had a stone wall that had been settling for a hundred years, and nothing in it was plumb. Our perfect circle looked crooked against that wall; the answer was not in the circle. We learned to sight the ring against the room instead of against a level. The third room was almost all glass, so the Aureole appeared twice, once in the air and once in the pane, and the second copy moved whenever somebody walked past.

• Height belongs to whoever stands below, not to the floor.
• A round form beside an old wall wants two cords and a little slack. Never one.
• In glass, a ring multiplies. The copies are part of the fixture.

Rooms four and five

The fourth room stood near the sea. Salt came in with the weather and, within one season, our untreated brass had turned the colour of dark honey. We had been making a bright metal that was meant to stay bright; the room wanted something else. So the Aureole is now finished two ways, lacquered or left to age, and we say plainly which one is going into the box. The fifth room was a bedroom, quiet and low-lit, and the person who slept there looked up at the underside of our ring every night. That underside had never been finished to be looked at. It carried the weld, a small ridge of filed brass, the honest evidence of a hand. We kept the evidence and softened it. The lower edge is polished now until it feels like the inside of a bowl, because a light you live with is seen from below far more often than from the side.

The bench work changed around those lessons. A length of brass is annealed, bent over a wooden form, and the joint is closed and filed until the seam can be found only by touch. The ring is left raw overnight so that we can look at it again with fresh eyes. Then it goes up on two cords, at the height this room wants rather than the height on the rack, and it stays there for three days while we work around it. Cord length, tilt, distance from the wall, all of it is adjusted in front of us. Only afterwards is a finish chosen.

Half of a lamp is made at the bench. The other half is made where it hangs.

Five rooms, and not one of them knew it was teaching us anything. Their measurements still sit in a notebook by the bench: hallway, stone, glass, salt air, bedroom. When an Aureole leaves the workshop it leaves with two questions attached to it. How high is your ceiling, and what is your wall made of. The ring is round. The room never is.