Cloak. Considered for Every Space.
A conversation with Luke Mills, Design Director at South Drawn
South Drawn’s new Cloak sconce pairs hand-formed artisan glass with a lighting system built to belong anywhere. We chat with Luke and unpack what it took to get there.
Some products arrive at their final form quickly. Cloak was not one of them.
South Drawn’s new wall sconce is defined by what you cannot see. No visible fasteners, no exposed fixings and no trace of the engineering behind its considered exterior.
What you are left with is glass and light. That restraint is the result of a sustained process of reduction.
A problem worth solving
The opportunity with Cloak was clear: bring South Drawn’s long-standing interest in organic, artisan-made materials into a form that could go anywhere. A bathroom, a bedroom, a hallway, an outdoor wall. Spaces with different demands, different moods and different materials surrounding them. The brief was to design something resolved enough to belong in all of them.
The glass panels in Cloak are individually moulded by a Melbourne-based artisan using a gravity slumping process. Each piece carries subtle variation, a quality that is part of the design rather than incidental to it. Getting that alongside a high-performing, durable LED unit required holding both things in mind from the very beginning.
“The constraints we set were reliability, and the ability to pair the unit with what are traditionally more organic materials. Those constraints then defined how we approached designing what can be a really complex unit, and then refining it down to its most essential elements.” – Luke
What gets hidden
The cleanliness of the finished form is not accidental. Fixing points, the sealing required to perform across demanding environments and the means by which an electrician installs the fitting are all absorbed into the design. The complexity that went in is precisely what allows the finished object to feel uncomplicated.
“There are no visible fasteners, and that was entirely intentional,” Mills says. “It takes a lot of refinement and revisions to get there. But it is the process of taking the product down to its most fundamental elements.”
Two directions in glass
The collection launches in two sizes, 250mm and 400mm, with six glass finishes across two distinct expressions. The ribbed glass has a structured, repeating formation that pairs well with strong architectural geometry. The textured option comes directly off the kiln with a naturally irregular surface. No two panels are identical.
Both interact with their environment rather than sitting apart from it. The translucency pulls through the materiality of the wall behind, reflecting and refracting the space around them.
“These were never meant to be a loud piece. They were meant to complement the materials and the space. And then when they are turned on, they bring that wall, that corner, to life.”– Luke
Cloak is available in two sizes and six glass finishes, made to order from South Drawn’s Melbourne studio with a six-week lead time.
