London Design Week came around in May 2023, and we took a former printworks on the eastern edge of the city. Six rooms, bare plaster, no ceiling lights at all. We wired our lamps into the bones of the building instead — a brass arc in the stairwell, three small discs along a corridor, one long piece hung low above a table nobody was allowed to sit at. The city did the rest. After seven in the evening the windows turned into frames, and people on the pavement stopped to read them.

What we showed

Nine pieces, most of them still warm from the workshop. Two were prototypes: copper shells we had beaten the week before, uneven in the way only hand work is uneven. We left them unpolished so the form could stay honest and visitors could find the marks our hands had made. The finished versions sat beside them, and the argument between the two was the most honest thing in the room. Nobody asked which one cost more. They asked which one came closer to what we meant.

Three things we noticed

• People stopped in the corridor, never in the middle of the room. Narrow light holds attention better than wide light.
• Almost everyone reached out. Fewer than one in ten actually touched the metal.
• The questions came at dusk. Failing daylight makes people talk about their own kitchens and hallways.

Over six days hundreds of visitors walked through, most of them arriving after work with their coats still damp. One wrote in the book by the door: I came to look at lamps and left thinking about my kitchen. We kept the page. On the last evening we switched the pieces off one by one, from the back of the building to the front, and stood in the doorway while the streetlights took over. Light is only ever borrowed. We simply hand it back, more slowly than we found it.