The Signature came into the showroom on the first cold morning of December, in a crate of twelve, each lamp wrapped in grey paper and tied with string. We had been making it since the spring, quietly, one a week between larger commissions, and none of us expected to feel so much when the first disc caught the light.

A lamp that keeps a handwriting

Its shape is almost nothing. A shallow brass disc, beaten and brushed by hand, held a few centimetres off the wall on a slim arm. Behind it a warm LED washes upward, and the disc throws a soft halo across the plaster: the edge stays dark, the centre glows. What makes the Signature the Signature is the face of that disc, which we leave smooth enough to take an inscription. A name, a date, a line in someone's own hand, traced into the metal with a fine burin and then sealed against the years.

The first request came from a visitor who wrote a single line on the back of an envelope and asked whether we could follow her handwriting exactly. We could. We keep a small box of samples by the bench now, and our engraver works from photographs whenever the hand that wrote them is far away.

What you can ask for

• A name, initials or a date, cut into the face of the disc in the lettering you choose.
• Your own handwriting, followed stroke for stroke from a photograph or a scanned line.
• Three finishes for the disc: brushed brass, darkened bronze, or a hand-painted ivory, each with a matching wall plate.
• A short note on the reverse, readable only by whoever takes the lamp down.

By the middle of the month the twelve were gone, and a further forty sat on the bench at various stages of beating. People asked for the Signature as a gift for someone else, then came back for a second one for themselves, which we did not plan for and are glad of. We built it to be a small object, and we are learning to build it slowly. Some lamps light a room. This one holds a sentence in it.