Dimmer Switch

If you're renovating or redecorating your home, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to beautiful hardware. Buster and Punch, for example, make gorgeous dimmer switches (see picture). The wall plate is brushed steel and the knob itself has a gorgeous knurled finish.

It turns the simple act of switching a light up or down into a delicious, tactile pleasure. Like the feeling of adjusting the volume on an expensive piece of hi-fi equipment. But there's a problem.

This beautiful dimmer switch, and all others like it, are built for domestic electricity. An Airstream trailer (or any other similar vehicle) uses a different voltage, so this beautiful stuff won't work.

Instead you have to buy 12 volt switchgear and that stuff is universally ugly, plasticky crap. So that's what you see, even in a lot of expensive professional restorations. Which is a shame.

Attention to detail is extremely important in design and the things you touch really matter. Design is also, fundamentally, about problem solving. There are no shortcuts to excellence. If the solution doesn't exist you have to create it. Or in this case, explain the problem to your friend and electronic engineer Ben, and ask him to create it for you.

Et voila. As you can see, he's designed and built a printed circuit that replaces the standard one and we now have an elegant solution to the problem. That's one problem down, a thousand to go.