An alpine lounge in summer is a strange room. The light outside is enormous — it comes off stone and snowfield and returns doubled — so anything we set inside it has to be quiet enough to lose that argument. We were asked to make the lamps for one such terrace room, high on a mountainside, open from early morning until the last guest left. Every piece was built here, in our workshop, by hand.

What the hands had to learn

The first arm went wrong three times. Copper does not forgive a hurry: bend it before it is warm enough and it splits along the grain; leave it too long on the torch and the surface goes dull, and no polishing afterwards gives back what the metal had. Our smith worked the sheet in short passes, annealing between them, listening more than looking. Nobody drew the curve we wanted. The fourth attempt arrived at it, and the three before stayed on the bench as a record of the distance.

Then the glass. Each shade was blown freehand, so no two hold quite the same form, and the wall thickness wanders by a millimetre. That wandering is the reason we kept them. In a room flooded with daylight a perfectly uniform shade reads as flat; a shade with one thin place lets the evening through slowly, the way light comes through ice.

Materials, and why we chose them

• Untreated copper for the arms. It will brown in mountain air, and we wanted the room to age with the season instead of staying new.
• Hand-blown borosilicate shades, kept thin at the rim so the filament floats in a halo rather than a shape.
• Linen-covered cable, braided and waxed, because a plastic sheen has no business beside stone and wood.
• A dimmer at every table, not one for the room. Dusk in the mountains arrives in stages; the light should too.

The lamps went up in crates, on the back of a small truck. We could not be there to hang them, so we sent a single sheet of notes: which arm takes which shade, how far the copper should stand off the wall, and where to stop dimming. A month later a photograph came back. The room was nearly dark, the ridge behind it still pale, and the copper had begun its slow turn towards brown.

Handmade means someone stood at a bench and decided, again and again, that this was close enough. We keep the phrase on a card by the annealing torch. Close enough is the only measure that survives a room like that one — a thing made for a particular slope, at a particular hour, in a light that behaves nowhere else.