Every South Drawn piece starts with a question about how form and function sit together. Ballast, our first candle collection, began somewhere more personal: as a project our co-founder and design director, Luke, had been working on in his own time, drawn to candlelight because it let him focus purely on form.
“I’ve always loved the sculptural side of working with candlelight,” Luke says. “It gave me a chance to focus purely on form.” That focus is what shaped Ballast from the outset: a collection built around two materials South Drawn works with often, machined metal and hand-slumped glass, brought together with as few fasteners as possible so the two components interact naturally.
Ballast takes its name from the detail at its centre: a heavy metal base that counterweights the glass above it. “The design inspiration was around combining two materials that we work with a lot at South Drawn,” Luke explains. “I knew I wanted to create a natural junction between the two, and the design landed on this tension where you have the heavy base of the candle acting as a counterweight, or ballast, to the piece.”
The result looks precarious at first glance, the glass appearing to cantilever off its base. It isn’t. The weight sitting low in the base is doing the quiet structural work that lets the piece look effortless.
Every piece in the Ballast collection has two faces. “There’s a natural, two-sided element to the design,” Luke says. “It’s sculptural, but has a practical element to the way it diffuses and reflects light. It’s also beautiful just as an ornament.”
Turn the piece one way and the glass reflects. Turn it the other and it shows off the organic texture cast into the glass itself, lit from within by the candle. Luke describes it as a simple profile with a few different faces, depending on where you’re looking from.
Ballast is available in Raw Stainless Steel and Bronzed Brass, paired with Sand Textured Clear or Sand Textured Grey glass, the same finishes used across the South Drawn lighting collection. Two sizes are available, Ballast Half for a tealight and Ballast Full for a standard candle, so the piece suits a mantelpiece, a bedside table, or several Ballast Half pieces gathered together.
Ballast also marks South Drawn’s first move into candle design, though it doesn’t feel like a departure. The same tension between materials, and the same instinct to hide every fastener, runs through the rest of the South Drawn lighting range, from pendants to linears, and Ballast simply scales that language down to something you can hold. It’s a foundation Luke is already building on, not a one-off, the first piece in what will grow into a full candle collection.
There’s a reason candlelight still holds its place alongside dimmable, tuneable LEDs. It’s the warmest, simplest light there is, the kind that tells your body it’s time to wind down. Where the rest of the South Drawn lighting collection gives you control over a room, candlelight does one thing perfectly: it slows you down.
Ballast began as something personal, and that’s still how Luke sees it: a small, precious piece of South Drawn, easy enough to give to the people you care about, no electrician required.
