Sapphire Lights

Today it is difficult to imagine how dark houses were in the past, not only at night but , in the gloomy British winter, for much of the day. Despite the significant improvements made to oil lamps in the late eighteenth century and the increasing use of gas lighting in the late nineteenth, few houses had a kind of lighting that we would consider to be adequate until electricity became generally available after the First World War. The choice of new light fittings for an historic interior therefore gifts a dilemma.