Sunday Light
The Californian sun in your living room
A few years ago, Nat Martin, who studied innovation-design engineering at London’s Royal College of Art, left for a stint in Los Angeles. When he got back, he found the gloomy grayness of London dispiriting compared with the Californian perma-sun. So, with a friend who is a mechanical engineer, he built a ceiling light to simulate sunlight indoors. Now his $6,900 Sunday Light is selling in impressive numbers to tech entrepreneurs and film executives in—and this is the bizarre bit—sun-kissed California.
This extreme case of coals to Newcastle may defy logic, but the Southern California vibe the Sunday Light produces is uncanny. Look up, and what looks like a real yellow sun hovers in a sky exactly the right shade of blue. Objects in the room-size pool of light look as bright and colorful as they would outside in the midday sun.