Don’t Bite This Lamp

A croissant from Yukiko Morita’s Pampshade label will set you back $125. A melonpan goes for $138, and a small pain de mie (white sandwich loaf) costs $228 – though you can get a single slice, toasted or untoasted, for $90 less. The baked goods are real, but Morita has transformed them into inedible lamps that will fill your space with a warm, oven-like glow.

Pampshade has been around as a brand since 2016 (it ships to Australia), but we’ve noticed the lamps on sale at more Australian stores lately, including Sydney lifestyle store Hands and Melbourne’s new Japanese homewares store Osara. The brand has also attracted more attention lately because of Temu dupes, which are also made from real bread but have reportedly attracted ants. (All of Morita’s works are treated to resist mould and decay.)

To make her signature lamps, Morita hollows out baked goods and preserves them with a combination of resins and coating materials – the exact mixture is “a bit of a trade secret”, she tells Broadsheet via email – and inserts LED lights.

The Kobe-based artist says people are always surprised when they find out her lamps are made using real bread, though there was a case of someone who “bought one by mistake thinking it was actual bread – despite the price being more than 10 times higher,” she recalls.

Others have tried to take a bite. “One time, the lamps were given as wedding favours, and I heard that a guest actually tried to take a bite. That said, once you hold it in your hands, it’s quite obvious that it’s not edible – it’s hard and preserved.”

The idea for Pampshade first came to Morita when she was working at a bakery part-time while at Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan studying printmaking and fine arts. “I couldn’t stand the sight of unsold bread being thrown away at the end of the day. I would take it in my arms and carry it home, eating it myself, decorating my room with it like flowers, giving it to friends,” she writes on her website.

“This modest attempt at daily resistance changed when one evening I saw the light from the western sun illuminating a piece of bread whose white contents I had hollowed out and eaten. For a brief, inexpressible moment, it glowed beautifully within the darkened room.” From that point on, she knew what she wanted to do as a creative. She made the first prototype in 2008 and she spent five years perfecting the recipe.

The first product was the bâtard bread lamp, but the croissant is by far the most popular. “People all over the world seem to fall in love with it. I think it’s the delicate light that spills out from between the buttery layers – it creates a soft, magical glow that draws people in.”

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