This August we gathered the photographs our workshop and our friends kept sending us — a path behind a stone house, a terrace still warm at eleven at night, a courtyard wall holding the last of the day — and turned them into a chapter we are calling Ways to Light the Outdoors. The premise is plain. Outside, light has less to work with and more to answer for, so every fitting has to be chosen for the hour it will actually be seen.

Four scenarios we keep returning to

We sorted the chapter into four situations. Each one asks something different of a lamp, and each one has a form in our collection that we have come to trust.

• The path. Low, warm, close to the ground. Light belongs on the walking surface, never in the eyes of the person walking.
• The terrace. A table wants a pool of light with soft edges, hung low enough that the conversation stays at the table.
• The old tree. One upward beam from the trunk and nothing else. A tree lit from two sides stops being a tree and becomes a decoration.
• The wall. Grazing light, set a few degrees off the surface, so plaster and stone keep their grain and their shadows.

What the lamps have to survive

Then comes the part nobody photographs. Rain driven sideways, frost settling into a joint, a whole summer of sun on a painted surface. An outdoor lamp is a piece of hardware before it is a piece of design, so we seal the housing, keep the gaskets replaceable, and finish the metal by hand exactly as we finish our indoor work — the surface should age, not fail. Where the run allows it we work at low voltage, because a garden ought not to need a trench dug through it every time somebody moves a light. Outdoors the best lamp is the one you stop noticing; what remains is the shape of the garden after dark.

The chapter went out to our showrooms and trade partners in the first week of August. The replies were practical rather than poetic: how low can a path light go, what does a hand-painted finish do after three winters, which fitting suits a wall that is not perfectly flat. All three are answered inside the chapter, and we will keep adding to it as the seasons turn. Ask us for a copy, or come and read it with one of our lighting advisers. Outside, light is borrowed from the dark.