Every so often a family needs one more member. This month two lamps join the collections we have been building for years: Vela Big, a wider version of the little table lamp we redrew nine times, and Astra W, the glass sphere of the Astra family lifted off the table and set into the wall. Both come from forms we already know. What is new is the scale, and the plane they sit on.

Two lamps, two directions

• Vela Big — the same folded sail shade, drawn about a third wider, so its light now reaches across a table instead of stopping at a bedside. The curve throws a soft crescent on the wall behind it, and the base has grown heavier to match. A lamp that size has to be able to stand still.
• Astra W — a hand-blown sphere held a few centimetres off the plaster on a small turned plate. On a wall the sphere reads differently than it does on a table: it becomes one point of light in a line of them, and the glass carries the colour of the wall back through the glow.

Made at the bench

Vela's shade starts flat. We score it, fold it and press it at the bench, then run a finger along the seam, because an uneven fold shows up first in the light and only later in the metal. Vela Big comes in brushed brass and in the matte slate we already use on the smaller lamp. The brass is left unlacquered on purpose. We would rather watch it darken where hands touch it than seal it behind a coat.

Astra's sphere is blown freehand, and freehand means no two are quite the same. The wall version asked for new hardware: a plate turned from solid, a stem set at a slight angle so the sphere hangs true against a wall that is rarely perfectly flat, and a channel cut into the back of the plate for the cable. The glass itself we left alone. It was already right.

Where they belong

Both lamps grew out of the same wish — to keep a form we trust and ask it to work in a room we had not asked before. Vela Big sits over a dining table, in a hallway, on a low sideboard. Astra W wants a corridor, a headboard, or a pair of them flanking a mirror. They are in the showroom now, made to order in the finishes we keep on the shelf.

Two more lamps. The family grows slowly, and the light stays ours.