In Berlin in 2007 we were given a set of dark interior rooms and a run of evenings to fill them. There was no daylight to work with and no fixed programme, only long hours after dusk. The brief, as we understood it, was light that could change with the hour and still hold the eye without shouting.

Gold, leafed by hand

We turned to the Golden Lights. The Nacre pendants hung low over the long table, their hand-finished aluminium keeping a warm 2700K pool exactly where people gathered. On the plaster walls the Moonlit W discs sat like small moons, lined by hand with leaf and turned away from the room, so the light travelled up the surface and came back softer. Overhead the Moonrise discs worked the same way at a larger scale, giving the ceiling its glow and leaving the floor in shadow.

Because every one of those surfaces was hand-laid, the room never sat still. Copper leaned warm, silver leaned cool, and the interiors seemed to breathe with the evening outside — the blue hour pressing against the glass, gold answering it from within. Visitors slowed down. Some came back twice to see the change.

We took the installation down at the end of its run. The method stayed with us: fewer lamps, better placed. Let the walls carry the light.