For 48 years they watched the sun go down from the same back verandah. Now she can’t leave her bed, so the old sign-maker built her a sunset she can pull down herself.

Darcy Pittaway spent fifty-one years building the lit signs along the Brand Highway. The last light he made hangs at the head of his wife’s bed. He has 248 left, and in January the shed where he builds them will belong to someone else.

Port Denison, Western Australia. Most of Darcy Pittaway’s shed is dark. At the far end, an old orange roadhouse O, pulled off a roof decades ago, still glows above his workbench. Below it, on plank shelves, sit rows of square boxes that each glow like the last ten minutes of a day.

Pull the black ball on the right and a white sun rises out of a dark horizon. Pull the red ball on the left and it sinks again, slowly, from gold to orange to a last red ember, until it slips under the line and is gone.

These are not night lights. Each one is a sunset small enough to hang beside a bed, made by a bloke who spent his life building lights for strangers. He built the first one for the only person he ever watched the sun go down with: his wife, Dulcie, who can no longer get to a window that faces west.

So he brought the sunset to her.

Now the house is sold to pay for her care, and the shed goes with it. What Darcy decided to do with the lamps still on his shelves has families writing to him from right across the country.

Nine hundred signs, and one more light

In 1968 Darcy opened Pittaway Signs in a rented garage in Geraldton, with a borrowed ladder and a glass-bending torch bought on terms. Over the next fifty-one years he built or rewired 912 signs: roadhouse signs, pub signs, motel arrows, servo signs, the lights that told tired drivers on the Brand Highway it was safe to pull over.

“A sign has one job,” he says, turning a screwdriver in fingers that are slower than they used to be. “Somebody’s been driving four hours in the dark out of Perth. You’ve got three seconds to tell them they can stop. You don’t do that with words. You do it with light.”

These days he drives up to Geraldton every arvo and sits with Dulcie until she falls asleep. Then he drives home, walks past the dark house and goes straight out to the shed. “It’s the only place I don’t keep listening for her,” he says.

Each lamp is a slim steel box with an acrylic face, and Darcy paints every sky on it himself, with the same brushes he once used to letter motel signs: pale gold up top, then orange, then the deep red that sits on the water in April, then black for the land. No two come out exactly alike.

Behind the painted sky sits a warm light that does the moving. Pull the black cord on the right and the sun climbs a little higher. Pull the red cord on the left and it sinks a little lower. Let go, and it stays right where you left it. Every lamp burns on the bench overnight before it gets a box. “Not fast,” he says. “It’s supposed to give you time to say something.”

Ask him why a bloke who spent his life on highway signs would spend his eighties building sunsets, and he points at a photo propped up on the shelf.

Two cane chairs facing west

Dulcie taught Year 2 at the primary school in Dongara for thirty years and kept the books for the sign business at the kitchen table. She and Darcy married in 1967. Ten years later they bought the house, and the family joke is that they bought it for the back verandah. It faces due west over the Indian Ocean, with nothing between it and the horizon.

Every evening after tea they carried two cuppas out to two old cane chairs. When the sun touched the water, Dulcie always said it first: There she goes. And Darcy always answered: Right on time. Their kids learnt early not to interrupt. “You don’t talk while it’s going down,” Dulcie told them. “You can talk after.”

She kept a notebook by the flyscreen door for the sunsets she rated a ten. In forty-eight years she wrote down 212 of them. Darcy still has it.

A window that faced the car park

In March 2025 Dulcie had a stroke at the kitchen table. The house, with steps at every door and the bedrooms up a flight of stairs, no longer worked. In May she moved into an aged care home in Geraldton. The staff were kind and the room was bright, but her one window looked east, over the car park.

“She never complained about that room,” Darcy says. “But around six o’clock she’d get restless. She’d look at the window, then at me. I knew what she wanted, and there wasn’t one thing out there I could give her.”

He tried a calendar of sunset photographs. He framed a picture of the verandah and put it on her dresser. She thanked him and looked at the window anyway. “A picture doesn’t do anything,” he says. “The sun moves. You sit there and you watch it go. That’s the whole thing.”

“There she goes”

So he built her one that moves. It took him most of June, and he painted her sky from memory: the view off their verandah on an April evening. He left out the switch, because Dulcie’s right hand can still grip but can no longer work anything small. Instead: two cords with round balls, red on the left to bring the sun down, black on the right to bring it back up.

He drove it to Geraldton wrapped in the crocheted rug from their lounge and didn’t tell her what it was. That evening he put the red ball in her hand. She pulled, and the sun slid down the panel, gold to orange to ember. When it touched the line, she said it. There she goes.

“And I said right on time,” Darcy says, and stops for a moment. “First time since March.”

It became their evening again. While the sun goes down, Dulcie tells the old stories: the night the wheat bins at the port caught the last light and glowed like a candle, the summer the kids slept out on the verandah. “Some nights she tells me about that verandah like I wasn’t there,” Darcy says. “I just let her.” Most nights she is asleep before the sun is all the way down. The night nurse started timing her rounds so she could stand in the doorway for the last part.

Within weeks, a retired cray fisherman two doors down asked his son to “find out about the sunset,” and a daughter from Northampton rang the house. By October, Darcy was back in the shed every night, building them for families he had never met.

Why everybody goes quiet at the same spot

“Nobody really looks at a light,” Darcy says. “They look at what it reminds them of.”

Most “sunset lamps” throw a flat orange circle on the wall or cycle through party colours. Darcy’s does the one thing a real sunset does: it moves, and it takes its time. Warm light, never blue, no glare, no hum. It is the most relaxing light you can have in a room.

What makes Darcy’s lamp different

Closing day is in January

Dulcie’s room costs more each month than the sign business made in a good year. To keep her where she is, the house had to go. It sold in September. He is moving into a unit in Geraldton, six minutes from her room.

“I don’t mind about the house,” he says. “A house is timber and nails. The verandah I minded, until I reckoned I’d already taken it with me.” He nods at the shelves. “It’s in every one of those.”

His granddaughter Kirra, who is studying nursing in Geraldton, asked the question nobody else wanted to: what happens to the lamps when the shed belongs to someone else? She found out what a sign shop would charge to build a lit box like this, A$380 to A$600, typed up a price list and suggested A$179. Darcy read it, folded it once and slid it back across the table.

He crossed out A$179 and wrote A$139: enough to cover the steel, the paint, the wiring, the cords and the box, and nothing on top. No shops, no middleman, and no second batch once the shelves are empty.

Letters from the first owners

After tea Darcy spreads the photos people send across the kitchen table, the way he used to lay out sign drawings. He expected bedrooms in aged care. He also got a grey modular in Fremantle, a reading nook in Bunbury, a kid’s room in Joondalup, plenty of them from people in their twenties and thirties.

“Turns out young people miss the evening too,” he says. “Dulcie always said a room needs one thing in it that isn’t in a hurry.”

When the shelves are empty

What’s on the shelves is everything Darcy built after Dulcie moved to Geraldton. In January the keys go to a young family from Perth, and the bench goes with the shed.

There is a second reason there won’t be more. Darcy’s hands have started to shake. The small connectors take him twice as long as they used to, and some nights Kirra holds the torch while he solders. “These are the last ones these hands are going to make,” he says. “I’d rather they hang somewhere they’re needed than sit on a shelf.”

Kirra packs every order in the shed by hand, and after January she’ll keep posting them from the unit until the last lamp is gone. Each lamp is dispatched within one to two business days and comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. “If it does nothing for the person you bought it for, send it back,” Darcy says. “I’ll understand. I just haven’t had to yet.”

If someone in your life has evenings that have got long, or if your own window faces the wrong way, this is the last chance to hang one of Darcy’s sunsets on the wall.