Our flagship showroom opened in Shanghai in 2022, and we built it as one long argument about what light does to a room. A showroom asks something of a lamp that a house never does. Nobody sleeps here. Nobody reads at midnight in the corner chair. A visitor decides how they feel about our work within the first ten steps, so the floor had to carry the demonstration itself: the lamps hold up the architecture, and the walls only stand behind them.

Rooms that disagree

We gave each collection a room and let the rooms argue. The Wireform spheres sit low in a grey volume, woven aluminium holding one small bulb until the whole cage glows. Down the corridor the Ledram discs hang in a patient row, throwing flat clean circles onto raw plaster. Light Stick stands at the end of the hall as a single straight line of brightness, with nothing between the source and the eye. The Giotto Line pieces lean up from the floor on thin stems and draw with light instead of filling the space with it. Wava and Jacqueline keep to the smaller rooms, where someone can get close enough to see how the metal was worked.

The upper floor is darker on purpose. Golden Lights and Myriad Light ask for low ceilings and slow eyes, and Stella Moon behaves best in a room with almost nothing else in it. The Heirloom Objects and Atelier Pieces sit behind glass at eye level, near enough to see where a hand pressed the material and moved on. Simile and PostCrissi share a wall of pale stone and let their shadows do most of the talking. Out on the terrace the Medusa Outdoor and Sypha Outdoor families take the weather; Shanghai rain runs off them and the light stays warm.

We wanted a place where you can switch things on yourself, step back, and watch the wall change. That is the whole reason for the floor. The Limited Edition case by the stair stays lit after everything else goes dark. Come and stand in it.