‘Sleep is a fragile thing – we need to treat it as a precious commodity': Heatherwick on reclaiming bedtime from our phones

At Tala’s Rivington Street showroom during London Design Festival, visitors were asked a series of personal – some might say impertinent – questions, the first being: What do you usually do before going to sleep? Below the words, four glass beakers invited a response. The container marked 'I spend time on my phone or screens' quickly filled with red marbles.

The poll captured the problem neatly. Our phones, it turns out, make excellent alarm clocks – and terrible sleep companions. 'They are the first and last thing you see in the day,’ says Thomas Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio. 'Even when you don’t pick them up, if they’re in sight, your brain is still spending time on them. Sleep is a fragile thing – we need to treat it as a precious commodity.'

Heatherwick is here at Tala’s Rivington Street store for the launch of the studio’s latest product. Three years in the making, ‘Wake’ is Heatherwick Studio’s response: part bedside lamp, part circadian-aware sleep aid, created with British lighting brand Tala. It pairs hand-glazed ceramic and pressed glass with programmable light and sound sequences designed to help users wind down at night and wake gently in the morning – no harsh blue-light-emitting screens required.

Thomas Heatherwick x Tala: from idea to object

‘We all know what it feels like to have a bad night's sleep,’ says Stuart Wood, Executive Partner at Heatherwick Studio, who led the project alongside Heatherwick. ‘A poor night's sleep, of course, affects your mood… it's now proven scientifically that a repeated poor sleep really harms your ability to recover, for your body to repair itself, to replenish, renew… the better your sleep… everything feels better – every question, every thought, every movement, just feels better.’

Yet, he points out, the current offering of sunrise alarm clocks is lacking. ‘If you go to a store and say, show me your sleep lights, they’re very plasticky, feel very temporary and very techy. We wanted to get rid of the visual noise so that it actually meets the objective.’

Heatherwick agrees: ‘It was about trying to make something that felt more like it belonged in your home, rather than something that looks like a micro spaceship that’s landed ready to go in a landfill site tomorrow.’

Tala, founded in 2015 by Josh Ward, Max Lousada and William Symington, has built its reputation on championing the emotional quality of light. With ‘Wake’, the brand wanted to move beyond the bulb to create its first full smart lighting product, aiming squarely at the rapidly growing $600 billion global sleep market. The brief to Heatherwick Studio was deceptively simple: design something tactile and beautiful that helps people reclaim bedtime from their phones. The result took three years to develop and is the most technically ambitious object Tala has made to date.

Touch, light, and sound

The final design feels simple but hides a surprising amount of engineering. A weighted ceramic base, hand-glazed so each one is subtly different, is topped with a softly rippled glass ‘sun’. Rotate the base to adjust brightness; press once to start a wind-down or wake-up sequence. The display hides behind the glass, glowing only when needed.

‘We were absolutely set on zero buttons,’ Wood explains. ’Rotating and pressing felt intuitive. The hard part was making the screen bright, legible and affordable while keeping it hidden.’

At night, the light fades gradually to warm tones as the room darkens; in the morning, it brightens slowly like dawn. Users set preferences in the Tala app once, then leave the phone out of the room entirely. 'The rhythms in our body are controlled by light,’ says Heatherwick, demonstrating a slow 'wind down' cycle designed to promote melatonin release. 'The idea that we can have a more gentle progression into sleep is quite important.'

Sound soon became part of the story, too. ‘For a number of people, actually, myself included, audio and sound complement light. And actually, those two go together,’ Wood says. ‘Some people prefer naturalistic sounds, whether that be rainfall or birdsong, but others actually do prefer versions of white noise… that help your brain sort of disconnect from the noise inside your brain.’

Material intelligence

Material choice was as much about feeling as function. Heatherwick talks about wanting to ‘not touch plastic’, about creating something ‘earthy, rooted, calming’ that carries weight and won’t skid off a bedside table. The grooves of the lamp’s ceramic base recal a sunset over water but are also a natural fit for fingertips to run over surface.

That thinking draws partly on the studio’s architectural work, including a vast new district in Xi’an, China, where extruded ceramic was used across façades to introduce warmth and imperfection at urban scale. ‘Ceramic has the imperfect qualities that give you the necessary visual complexity that our eyes and brains need,’ Heatherwick says. ‘Actually, if our environment is too clinically perfect, our cortisol actually rises.’

The same principles shaped Wake. Wood explains that while the team was drawn to ceramics and glass for their warmth and tactility, working with natural materials on a product of this complexity proved challenging. 'It's a very hard thing to mass manufacture, because those are imprecise materials with tolerances that can't be controlled, like plastic.' In the end, the studio decided to celebrate these imperfections and differences between each ceramic base. 'I really like the fact that it's this sort of technology and science delivered through the lens of something that feels natural and calm and a bit varied, because we couldn't control everything – I think that was an important part of the project.'

For Wood, this cross-pollination between projects is key to Heatherwick Studio’s work. ‘For me, the connection is thinking about functionality at the same time as joy, delight and emotion. It's all design. Designing an airport, in a way, is the same process as designing a sleep light. It's just bigger and there's more of it.’

Heatherwick links Wake to a broader shift in society’s interest towards health, human experience and rediscovering our basic, but often overlooked, needs. As general director of the Seoul Architecture Biennale, opening this week on 26 September, he is leading a city-wide conversation about the impact of buildings on wellbeing. ‘We’re talking about sleep health,’ he says, ‘but also looking at the impact of buildings from a health perspective on society more broadly… it's so obvious that buildings affect your health, and yet there’s no training at all on their wider impact on society. It’s been treated as though [architecture is] not part of our public health. So I think there’s a sort of spectrum on which these things relate.’

Available in the UK (£255), US ($295) and EU (€305) through tala.co.uk and John Lewis, Wake is the studio’s most accessible product to date which is a prospect that fills the team with excitement. ‘The idea that this could be in hundreds of thousands of homes, helping people have a nicer day,' Wood says, ‘that gives me real pleasure.'

tala.co.uk