On a cold evening in late March we hung three Luna wall lights along the long plaster wall of our showroom, switched them on, and stayed to watch. The lamps had come off the bench that morning. By dusk the wall behind them had turned the colour of thin honey, and nobody in the room said anything for a while.

A shallow dish, a gilded inside

Luna is shallow, hardly deeper than a cupped hand, and it sits close to the wall, so that almost nothing of the lamp is really visible. What you see is the inside of the dish, finished by hand in a warm gold that we burnish until it stops looking like metal and starts looking like evening. The light source hides behind the rim. It throws onto that gold first, and the gold throws onto the wall.

What happens at dusk

Through the day Luna stays a quiet half-moon of brushed metal, easy to miss. Once the room dims, the wall above it begins to glow: a soft crescent widening upward, deepest in colour close to the rim, with nothing hard-edged anywhere in it. We measured nothing that first evening. We moved a chair, sat down, and watched the plaster go from grey to amber as the light outside went out.

Gold forgives nothing. Every stroke of the brush stays on the surface, so you slow down and let the wall tell you when it is enough. — one of our finishers, at the Luna bench

Since then Luna has gone out to a handful of homes and to one long hotel corridor, always onto a wall that people pass rather than look at. That is the point of it. A lamp you notice stays a lamp; a lamp you notice the wall around becomes light. Dusk finishes the work.