In Conversation with Patrick Watson

Before joining the family business, Patrick Watson, our Head of Commercial, worked on lighting for hotels, bars and restaurants, including projects for Harrods and Annabel’s. Today, he works closely with our product development and projects teams, bringing that experince and practical understanding into bespoke lighting projects and helping find the right solution for each scheme.

We sat down with Patrick to talk about creating atmosphere, getting proportions right and knowing when to break the rules.

Before joining Heathfield & Co, you worked on lighting for hotels, bars and restaurants, including Harrods and Annabel’s. What did that experience teach you about creating atmosphere – and what can we take from it into our homes?

I think the key is to really consider how you want people to feel in a space. In a restaurant, you need enough light for people to feel comfortable and see what they’re eating, but you also want that sense of intimacy. The balance makes a huge difference.

The same applies at home. Think about where you want the light to fall: across a dining table, beside an armchair or onto a particular architectural detail. You don’t need to light every part of a room equally.

Control is really important too. A room can feel very different during the day compared to the evening, so warmer light and the ability to dim it will give you much more flexibility. That’s something I’d always consider alongside the design of the fittings themselves.

When you first look at an interior scheme, what tells you whether the lighting is going to work?

I'd start with the proportions of the room and how it’s going to be used. Where is the furniture? What do you want to draw attention to? A fitting might look great on its own, but the overall scale and position need to make sense within the scheme.

For a central pendant or chandelier, a useful starting point is to add the room’s length and width in metres, then use that number in centimetres as a guide to the diameter. So a room measuring 4m by 5m would suggest a fitting around 90cm across. But that being said, I wouldn’t choose a piece on that calculation alone. Ceiling height, the shape of the fitting and whether it’s sitting above a table all affect what feels right, but its a really good starting point.

With wall lights, I’d look at the height in relation to the furniture and the people using the room. A light beside a bathroom mirror has a different job from one beside a sofa. You also need to consider where the bulb sits and whether it will be shining directly in someone’s eyeline.

For me, the best schemes are the ones where those decisions have been considered early, while there’s still the freedom of time to get the positions right.

Is there a lighting rule you think designers should feel more confident breaking?

The idea that all the lighting in a room needs to match! I think mixing designs can make an interior much more interesting, provided there’s a common thread that connects them.

For example, a sculptural glass chandelier can look beautiful alongside more classic wall lights with fabric shades as long as the the metalwork in the same finish. The metalwork gives them a shared handwriting but allows each piece to bring something different to the room.

I’d also encourage people to be more playful with lampshades. As interiors become more playful again with colour and pattern, there’s an opportunity to bring that into the lighting too. A rich, textured velvet or a contrasting trim on a lampshade can change the character of quite a simple lamp. The shade is a big part of the design, so it deserves as much consideration as the base.

What is the most interesting bespoke lighting request you’ve worked on?

We get some quite unexpected requests from designers, which is one of the things I enjoy most about bespoke projects.

Last summer, we produced a series of thirteen wall lights for a residential project that looked as though they could have come straight from a medieval castle in the 1500s – if they’d had electricity, of course!

They couldn’t have been further removed from Heathfield’s usual design aesthetic, which made the project particularly interesting. It’s a good example of why it’s always worth having the conversation with us, even if the idea doesn’t look like anything in our collection.

The Six Senses London project was three years in the making, with around 90% of the fittings bespoke. What made it such an interesting project to work on?

The project was a great example of how a bespoke lighting project can evolve, from the initial design conversations through to the final installation, and how collaborative the process can be between the designer and manufacturer. What I enjoyed most was seeing how the designs evolved over those three years. Some of the fittings we made were very close to AvroKO’s first sketches; others changed considerably as the scheme developed.

The large metal and glass fittings in the lobby are a good example of that. They started out as a more ‘perimeter’ style fitting, with a wave-like form designed to follow the coffer in the ceiling. As the project developed, the design evolved and we eventually landed on the larger metal and glass fittings you see today.

Now that it’s finished, it’s fascinating to look back at those early drawings and see what stayed and what changed. Seeing an idea become a finished fitting, installed in the space it was designed for, is one of the most satisfying parts of the job.

What would you like to see designers asking more of lighting manufacturers and how are those conversations shaping what we develop at Heathfield & Co?

I’d love for designers to ask, “Could we adapt this to work better for our scheme?” We’re manufacturers and not 'drop shippers', so these are the conversations we really enjoy.

We make our lighting in-house, which gives us the flexibility to work with a design rather than simply supply it as it appears in the collection. That might mean adjusting the drop height or changing an element of the metalwork to get the proportions right for a particular space. Sometimes a relatively small alteration is all it takes.

Those conversations also help us understand what designers need from the collection - if the same request keeps coming up, it gives us something useful to consider in product development. Working closely with designers helps us create lighting that responds to the way they’re using it.