In July 2017, our Creative Director, Helen Parker, began work on transforming the oldest part of deVOL’s Cotes Mill showroom into a new classic kitchen display. She pictured soft white cabinets with rich dark woods, terracotta floors, luscious greenery and a vast array of delicate pendant lights all hanging at different heights. Helen tasked freshly graduated Fine Artist, Kat Major Janes, with creating the lighting for the display and they spent the next half year developing the new range together.

Porcelain is known for its delicacy and a kind of pure whiteness which, when combined with its translucency, made it the obvious choice for the lights in this space. We experimented with elaborate patterns and glazes before deciding to leave the shades unglazed and let the natural surface quality of the porcelain take centre stage. This gives them a chalky matt finish and allows light to glow through in soft, peachy hues. It also meant we were free to focus more attention on developing the forms, such as the pleated shades which are inspired in part by the popular French milk glass lighting of the early 20th century. The earliest attempt at making a pleated light involved draping a thinly rolled sheet of wet porcelain over a mandala of pencils leant against an upturned bowl. This worked surprisingly well but there were a lot of refinements to be made in order to achieve the neat and uniform pleats that we wanted. Eventually, a series of clay formers were carefully sculpted by hand and cast in plaster to create moulds for draping the porcelain sheets.

In the end, we settled on twelve different porcelain shades and decided to pair them with simple and classic fittings. The pendants are sold with antiqued brass lampholders and a subtle off-white twisted fabric flex cord. We have also introduced a plug-in option to the range. Our ‘plug it, hang it, twist it lights’ are available with all twelve shades and all of the same fittings, but they are supplied with a three pin mains plug and a built-in turn switch on the lampholder. This makes for an incredibly versatile little lamp; you can hang it from a hook, coil it around a beam or rail and easily move it around your house, wherever you fancy. We’re so pleased with how these porcelain pendant lights have turned out and their popularity has exceeded all our expectations. Since completing the range in March 2018, we’ve sold hundreds of lights to people from all over the world, including individual kitchen customers and interior design agencies. They have also been featured in several design magazines and on renowned interiors sites like Remodelista. This is remarkable considering that every light is individually crafted by hand, by a small team in our little ceramics studio at Cotes Mill.