You might think you are looking at a lamp. You would not be wrong. But this is no ordinary lamp. For starters this is a Jeilde Signal lamp - possibly the most endearing piece of interior lighting I have ever come across. Unchanged in design since the day it was thought up by a Frenchman named Jean-Louis Domecg and a piece of design history.
The Jielde started life as a spotlight for the workplace - the kind of thing you would use to illuminate your workbench while undertaking a bit of industrial mechanics.
Before long it was the standard lighting choice throughout France, and it's still produced to this day in the original factory in Lyon, each piece given its own individual serial number.
But all that is not what makes this lamp special. That would be down to the day trip to a village just outside Oxford we undertook to collect it. Where the worst saleswoman in the world subjected us to an hour-long tour of some of the most expensive interior illumination created by man.
At the very end of this tour, in the corner of a former dairy, surrounded by Sebastian Wong Spun lamps and next to an industrial studio light, perched our Jielde.
It felt like I was rescuing it.
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