Housing
Solid aluminium, turned from billet and bead-blasted by hand until the surface stops reflecting and starts to hold light. Anodised in batches of twelve, so that every instrument in a batch matches.
6061-T6 · Type II anodise · three finishes
Instrument No. 1 — Compline
Darkness is a material.
Compline is a bedside instrument that shapes the light and sound of a room across the whole night, then withdraws. No screen, no account, no notifications. One brass dial.
- Light
- 1,800–4,000 K, down to 0.05 lux
- Sound
- 20 Hz–16 kHz, 26–38 dB
- Control
- One dial. No screen.
- Made
- Jena, 400 a year
01 — Premise
The average bedroom holds seven small lights nobody asked for. Sleep is not a software problem. It is a problem of photons and pressure waves, and those are solved by objects — made carefully, placed beside the bed, and left alone.
We spent three years measuring rooms before we drew anything: light at the pillow, sound at the ear, and the small hours at which each begins to interfere. What we found was modest. The night asks for very little, but it asks precisely.
Compline is that precision made physical. It dims a room on a curve rather than a timer, masks sound without announcing itself, and wakes you with light before it ever uses noise. Then it stops. Nothing to open in the morning; nothing to review.
02 — The instrument
One object, one dial, no screen.
Compline stands 170 mm tall and weighs 1.6 kg — heavy enough to stay where you put it. Everything it does, it does through four parts.
03 — A night, composed
Eight hours, scored.
- 22:30 – 23:45
Descent
The lens begins at 2,400 K and settles toward the colour of embers. Sound arrives as slow pink noise, paced to your breathing.
- 23:45 – 02:30
Dark
By 23:45 the lens is out. Nothing in the room glows, including us. Sound settles to brown noise, low enough to belong to the room.
- 02:30 – 04:30
The trough
The body’s coldest hours. Sound ducks to 26 dB and stops adjusting. Compline’s work here is to do nothing, with total accuracy.
- 04:30 – 05:45
Lift
Light returns before sound does: an ember at 0.1 lux, rising so slowly that you will not remember when it began.
- 05:45 – 06:30
Rise
4,000 K by 06:30. One sustained chord, once, at 36 dB. Then silence, and a room that was already awake.
Light 2,400 KSound 38 dB
04 — Craft
Eleven hours at the bench, for an object that does almost nothing you can see.
Lens
One piece of opal borosilicate, ground at a Jena workshop that has made optical glass for a hundred and forty years. We reject one in five. The workshop considers this generous.
Ø 118 mm band · seat tolerance ±0.02 mm
Voice
Each driver is tuned by ear, one at a time, by one of two people. Their initials are engraved inside the base, where only whoever repairs it will ever read them.
58 mm full-range · 20 Hz–16 kHz
- Parts per instrument
- 212
- Bench time
- 11 h 20 min
- First-year edition
- 400
- Warranty
- 15 years
- Repairs
- For life, in Jena
05 — Reserve
Four hundred, this year.
The first edition is limited by the bench, not by marketing. A €200 deposit holds your place; the balance falls due when your instrument is ready, in the third quarter. Deposits are refundable until the day it ships.
€1,480incl. VAT · insured delivery
I stopped knowing what time it was. It took a week to notice I had stopped needing to.”