The room reached us as a drawing and a single request: one long table, and light that would not argue with what sat on top of it. We began at the bench in the middle of winter. By the first days of March three crates had left the workshop for Hangzhou, and the benches went quiet again.

Hands before drawings

None of these pieces were made from a rendering alone. The pendant shells were spun from a single sheet of brass, then held up to the north window a dozen times until the curve read correctly at arm's height, which is the height at which somebody pours. Hammering came next: light, uneven, spaced by ear rather than by gauge, so that each surface carries the rhythm of a wrist and not the pass of a machine. The inside of every shell we left bright and untouched. That is where the light lives, and we wanted it to leave the room without losing anything on the way out.

Three materials did most of the talking, and each was chosen in the hand rather than on paper:

• Brass, spun thin and hammered by hand, then left to darken on its own for a week before we sealed it, so the tone arrived instead of being applied.
• Mouth-blown glass for the diffusers, ground at the rim until the source stopped showing as a point and became a softness.
• Blackened steel for the ceiling stems, the quiet parts, meant to disappear against the ceiling and hold the rest.

What a tasting room asks of light

Tasting is a question of colour and of honesty. Light that runs too cool makes a pale wine look thin; light that is too generous leaves nobody able to see the face across the table. So we hung the fixtures low over the boards, gave them a wide dimming range all the way down to almost nothing, and left the far corner to one small wall piece that fills the space without ever being looked at. The table receives the light. The people around it receive the shadow.

We installed over two days. We had spent two months at the bench before that. Slow work, in the end, is only the part of the light you are not meant to notice.