Lighthouse Lamp

The seed of the idea for the lighthouse lamp came from a design Geoffrey Bawa had created for the bar of the Triton Hotel (now the Heritance Hotel) in Ahungulla, Sri Lanka, in the early eighties. “He didn’t want there to be too much light in your face—just enough so the surface would be lit,” says Channa Daswatte, Bawa’s last associate.

Eventually, like so many of Bawa’s lighting designs, this too evolved into a stage—for a series of terracotta sculptures that he wanted displayed in the lounge of the Lighthouse Hotel (now the Jetwing Lighthouse Hotel). Daswatte recalls how he and Bawa took the idea of the shade from the original design, placed it on three uprights, and created a base for the sculpture to stand on. “Like a little lit-up cage,” Daswatte explains.

The lamp never went into production and was subsequently seen at Geoffrey Bawa’s Number 11 home, where it sat for years until Phantom Hands co-founder Aparna Rao spotted it, and was immediately intrigued. Because the lighthouse lamp, at first glance, is a geometrical impossibility. The shade resembles the corner of a cube with three, clean, flat surfaces meeting at a point. A closer look reveals its technical audacity. Bawa didn’t want the thickness of the metal edge to be visible, nor the wiring, nor the bulb. To that end, he had the metal planes slightly curved, but with such subtlety that they appear flat to a casual observer.

The original lighthouse lamp was made in galvanised iron but Phantom Hands’ version shifts the material palette to teak, veneer, and stainless steel, “Because the metal edges felt very sharp,” Rao says. She also felt that the warm tones of wood aligned better with the soft quality of the light. The result is a lamp that, like its namesake structure, marks a metaphorical shore, while signalling to observers that something here is worth paying attention to.