Butterflied Pendant

Lead Designers Emily Priest & Nat Cheshire

Entry Description

The lights were custom made for a hospitality project with little money left in the budget - not nearly enough for a catalogue fitting. Making our own proved far more satisfying.

We sought a light that was at once formally simple and materially rich. It needed to have sufficient presence to hold a big dining table, but have a silhouette fine enough to sit quietly in a beautiful old room.

The piece reveals itself as one draws closer: a fine plane of swamp kauri shaped into a disc; off-cuts reused as butterflies and stitched into and stabilising old cracks; the finger-tip scaled hand tooling of a local wood turner follows the grain, catching light on the underside.

A fine brass rod pierces the disc and reaches up to meet the ceiling precisely: the traditional ceiling rose is rejected in favour of a flush setting with hidden, threaded joints. We worked hard to conceal the light source, a tiny, high powered, warm LED sequestered inside the stem of the rod.