In the second week of May 2022 we took a ground-floor room in an old London warehouse and left it open to the street for the length of design week. Eight of our lamps went in, and nothing else. No booth, no printed stand, no screen looping a film of the workshop. There was a bench along the back wall, a plaster plinth we had cast the week before, and a book for names.

The room, and how we lit it

The window faced north, which is the only reason we chose the place. Daylight came in grey and even until six, and after that our lamps carried the room alone. We hung three pieces along the window wall so their light could meet what was left of the day, and set the rest low.

• A wall piece in beaten copper, hung at eye level so the hammer marks caught the window.
• Two floor lamps angled into the corner where the brick had never been painted over.
• A small table lamp on the plinth, the one everyone leaned in for.
• One prototype with a bare, unfinished stem, left there on purpose.

Every dimmer was a little brass wheel at hand rather than a scene on a panel, so visitors could turn things down themselves, and many did. The room changed its temper four or five times an hour without anyone arranging it. That is close to our whole argument about light: give people the wheel, and they will tell you what a room should feel like at nine in the evening.

Who came through

Mostly pairs, mostly off the street, most of them with a map of the week folded into a pocket. They came in for four minutes and stayed for twenty. They photographed the shadows on the brick more often than the lamps, which pleased us, because the shadow is the part we spend months arguing over. An architect asked whether the stem had been rolled; we told her it was beaten, and she asked to touch it. We said yes. Someone wrote in the book that the room smelled of warm metal, and we have quoted that line at each other ever since.

On the last evening we left the lamps off and the door open, and people still came in and stood around the bench in the dark. We packed the plinth into a crate, swept the brick, and put the book in a drawer. A week is a short time to hold a room. It is long enough to see which light people walk towards.