A design gallery in Milano came to us with an awkward brief: light that would not compete with the objects on show. In 2017 we built the answer by hand, piece by piece, for those rooms alone. Nothing here belongs to a series.

Made for one room, once

The white volumes of a gallery swallow light, so we worked against them. Rough iron bases carry spheres of hand-woven aluminium wire at different heights, each holding one small bulb inside its open cage. The wire lets the source show, and what comes back is shadow — a loose net of lines drifting across the plaster as visitors move beneath it. Along the long wall, thin copper sticks hold small glass lenses, gathering direct light onto the plinths and leaving the rest of the room in reserve.

We kept the fixtures low and close to the floor. Light arrives from the middle of the space rather than from above, so the scale of the furniture shifts, and the walls sit further back than they do. Warmth collects in the metal; iron reads as skin rather than structure. The objects on display keep their own lighting. Ours only holds the room together.

Some work exists once, in one place, and then only in photographs. This is that kind.