The UV Fold wall light spent years in the sketchbook of Luke Mills, South Drawn’s design director. UV Fold was one of the first collections in the range, and a wall version was always part of the plan. What held it back was the rating. It had to be IP65, a wall light that could go outside, and getting there took a lot of engineering, design and testing.
“We just weren’t willing to make any concessions on the technical element,” Luke says. “It was really important that this was an outdoor wall light.”
The linear has done well because it is clean and pared back, refined until only the critical elements remain, and the wall light follows the same approach. It carries a couple of years of product and technical development. “What’s deceiving is how simple it looks, but there’s a high level of attention to detail given to every element of the design.” That runs from how it’s assembled in house with our own production in mind, to how it’s installed and how it’s designed to be serviced.
The bracket alone went through a number of iterations. The aim was a clean, minimalist mount that conceals the technical elements and sits with the soft, architectural lines of the fold. Soft curves take a powder coat well, and the mounting plate sets a deliberate shadow line between the wall and the light. “It’s all those little details that really set it apart from a standard wall light. It’s what we take a lot of pride in.”
The light itself is indirect. Two lenses point up and down, throwing light straight up the wall and down towards the ground. Whether the ceiling above is flat or angled, the light bounces naturally back into the space. It suits entries and hallways, where the ceiling, the eaves or the ground carry ambient light into the space, enough to walk down a hallway or find your keys at the door. The same principle is being carried into our ceramic collections, Form and Tile.
“One piece I always like to have in a collection is variety,” Luke says. The UV Fold Linear already comes in a wide range of lengths, and the wall light carries that over into four sizes, which is unusual for a single collection. The smallest, the 200, suits bathrooms, and the tallest, the 500, is sized for outdoor spaces and high ceilings. There are two profiles, the angular V and the slimmer U. Both come in the same curated range of textured powder coats as the linear, with the shade and body always matched. “We take a lot of time in selecting our powder coats,” Luke says. “They work really well with aluminium, they work well outside, but they have these beautiful texture elements which play nicely with the soft forms.”
The U Fold and V Fold wall lights are made to order in four sizes, with a six week lead time.
