The last overhead light

The manifesto is still on the homepage. We refuse to accept a future lit from directly above. We wrote that in 2019, we have never softened it, and we did not take it down when we started making a pendant. It is the first thing anyone reads on this site, and the pendant is now four clicks away from it. Both of those sentences are true at the same time and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are aware of how this looks.

The letters got longer

For about eighteen months, people wrote to ask whether we would make a ceiling light. Not many. Perhaps one a fortnight, which at nine people is often enough that everyone in the building hears about it.

The replies got longer. That was the tell.

The first ones were two lines — no, that is not what we do, and here is the reason. By the end they ran to four paragraphs, and the fourth paragraph was always a faintly defensive account of what a rented apartment is like. Somewhere in there the answer had stopped being a position and started being a habit we were defending.

The shape of the last one, roughly: we understand the constraint, we do not think the constraint is your fault, and we still believe the correct answer is a lamp standing on a surface. We appreciate that you have one power outlet and that it is in the ceiling.

Read that back cold. It is not an argument. It is an apology with a no attached to it.

The argument, both halves

This was settled over about five weeks and it was not amicable. Both sides are given here as they were actually made, because a staged argument where one side is obviously right would be worth nothing to read.

Against the pendant. The objection was never only to the color. Overhead light flattens a room because of where it comes from, not what temperature it is. Put a source directly above a face and every horizontal surface throws its shadow straight down — under the brow, under the nose, under the chin. Warm that light to 1,800 Kelvin and you have a warm flat light. You have fixed the color and left the geometry precisely where it was. A company that has spent six years explaining that geometry to people does not then sell the geometry back to them with a better finish on it. And if the real problem is that some rooms only have a ceiling outlet, the honest answer is an extension cable, not a product.

For the pendant. Take a dining table. A table is the one surface in a house where the thing being lit is the surface — the plates, the food, the hands. No face is being modeled. No room is being described. Overhead is not a compromise there, it is correct, and it has been correct since people first hung a candle over a table. And then the second half: what we actually complained about, every time, in writing, was 4,000 Kelvin, undimmable, and flat. We named those three things constantly and the ceiling itself almost never. The ceiling was simply where the bad light happened to live. We had spent six years treating the address as the crime.

Both of those were argued by people who have worked here for years. Neither has since said they were wrong.

A photograph from Antwerp

What settled it was not an argument. It was a photograph.

A customer sent a picture of their dining table with a Dimpsy One standing on it, because standing a task lamp on the table was the only way they had found to get warm light onto it at all. The lamp was in the middle. You could not see across it. Nobody was complaining — they were showing us a workaround they were rather pleased with.

It was a bad workaround. And we had caused it.

What we did not concede

The Halo falls to 1,800 Kelvin like everything else we make. It carries the Spillguard baffle, which on a pendant does the most visible work it does anywhere: the light lands on the table as a circle with an edge on it, rather than washing up the walls and calling that atmosphere. It has one button.

In every respect we have ever actually argued about, it is the thing that was missing. It is a ceiling light that behaves.

Where that leaves it

The manifesto stays up. The pendant is for sale.

We have been asked which of those is the real position, and we do not have a better answer than: both of them are, and they were never quite about the same thing.