Design is a family affair for Jake Dyson. He uses the bagless vacuum cleaners invented by his father, James, who in turn has his son's lights fitted in the dining room of his stately Gloucestershire mansion. Passing through Hong Kong, the younger Dyson is wearing a white T-shirt crafted by his brother-in-law, who runs a Notting Hill shop above the boutique run by Jake's sister, Emily, a fashion designer.
So it is not surprising to hear Jake Dyson acknowledge that he has to work extra hard to make a name for himself as an industrial designer. Recognition, he hopes, will come with a ground-breaking LED desk light he has designed to revolutionise the way we illuminate our work days. His aluminium Csys task lamp boasts a smooth, sexy motion, radically reduces the amount of energy used - and never breaks.
'The whole purpose of this product is to make LEDs sustainable for life,' Dyson, 39, says. 'I've spent two years making a product that's extremely reliable - I don't want to be designing something that's going to be obsolete.'
The Csys is named after the Cartesian co-ordinate system used to plot the position of an object in three dimensions - a reference to the lamp's ability to strike and hold any pose around its base. Resembling a small but sleek construction crane, the lamp stays in position without a clumsy Anglepoise arm. A dimmer with a memory means the light remembers your favourite setting even after being unplugged.
If positioned low on a table the Csys can cast a beam that narrows to a point, and if stretched to its full 60cms height it provides illumination wide enough to cover an architect's bench. And thanks to its pioneering adaptation of heat-pipe technology it dissipates heat in a much more subtle fashion than most LEDs. As a result, Dyson claims, the light can operate at full power for 160,000 hours or more - at 12 hours a day, that is 37 years without blowing a bulb.
'I love lights as objects - the only thing that frustrates me is that a lot of expensive Italian designer lights were expensive because of their looks only,' Dyson says. 'No one was working to improve the product and quality of the light.'