We started work on the alabaster table lamp in the spring of 2024 and did not ship one until eighteen months later. It is by a wide margin the hardest object we have ever put into the catalogue, and almost none of the difficulty was where we expected it to be.
The brief was simple enough to write down: a small lamp, warm, that you could leave on all evening without it feeling like a light source. Something closer to a lit window than a bulb. We assumed the hard part would be the electronics.
Prototype one: the wrong material
Our first attempt used a hand-blown opal glass shade, because opal glass is what everybody uses and it diffuses beautifully. It also, we discovered after living with it for a month, goes completely dead when it is switched off. A glass shade with no light behind it is a grey object. It reads as equipment waiting to be used, which is the opposite of what a lamp should do in a room for the sixteen hours a day it is off.
That observation reframed the whole project. We stopped asking what makes good light and started asking what makes a good object that also happens to make light. Stone was the obvious answer and, it turned out, an expensive one.
Volterra, and a stone cutter's patience
Alabaster has been quarried around Volterra in Tuscany since the Etruscans, and it does something almost no other stone does: at about six millimetres of thickness it becomes translucent, and it glows amber rather than white. Thicker than eight millimetres and it goes opaque. Thinner than five and it will not survive being shipped.
Getting a consistent wall thickness inside a curved, hollow form is the entire problem. Our second prototype came back from the workshop with walls varying between four and nine millimetres, which meant that lit from inside it had bright patches and dark patches like a badly developed photograph. The third had even walls and cracked in transit.
Marco, who cut every one of them, was considerably more patient about this than we were. His view was that we were asking a material that had spent two hundred million years becoming what it is to accommodate a delivery schedule, and that it would take the time it took. The fourth prototype worked. We have not changed the geometry since.
What it costs, and why
The lamp is £285, which is a great deal of money for a small light and considerably more than we wanted it to be. Roughly sixty percent of that is the shade — the stone itself, the cutting time, and a rejection rate at the workshop that still runs near one in five because a vein of the wrong density does not announce itself until the piece is nearly finished.
Each shade carries the veining of the block it came from, which means no two lamps have ever been identical and we have stopped photographing them as though they are. What arrives at your door will be recognisably the object in the photograph and unmistakably not the same one, and after two years of arguing about it internally, we think that is the most honest thing about it.
