Most lamps ask for a switch. peco-poco, the new commercial light from Tokyo studio HOWDUNIT and Yamagiwa, asks for a small performance instead. You take the folded fabric shade and raise it by hand, a rhythmic motion the designers named for the sound it makes, and the room fills as the layers stand up.
A lamp you raise like a bellows
HOWDUNIT describes peco-poco as a lamp that lets you physically savor the moment light fills a space. Rather than a flick, there is a short, deliberate sequence of gestures. The folded shade rises with that peco-poco feel, and light diffuses softly into the room. The studio's point is simple: the instant a dark room becomes a lit one is easy to ignore, and this object makes you notice it.
The shade is layered fabric drawn in graceful curves. As it opens, the cloth stacks into a square column and throws graduated shadows, with light seeping through the weave. HOWDUNIT says the restrained rectangular form, built from the repetition of a single shape, can sit in many kinds of rooms without raising its voice. The designers are Haruto Kamijo and Sho Tasaki, who founded the Tokyo studio around questions of how forms and functions come into being.
What Yamagiwa lists for peco-poco
On the Yamagiwa product page, peco-poco is listed as model 320S7616. It stands 350 millimetres high and 150 millimetres square, and weighs 1.2 kilograms. The body is painted steel and resin. A built-in LED runs at 3500K with a colour rendering index of 97. It charges over USB, comes with a cable, takes three and a half hours to fill, and runs for five hours at full brightness. A stepped dimmer moves through 100, 50, 25 and 5 percent before it goes off, with a long press to shut it down.
Those numbers describe a portable object, not a fixture wired into a ceiling. You can charge it, carry it and raise the shade wherever the evening happens.
From a Yamagiwa prize to a product
peco-poco began as the grand-prize winner of the Yamagiwa Under 25 Idea and Design Competition. The original project is still on the studio site. Yamagiwa has now put a commercial edition on its own catalogue, which is how a student-era idea becomes something you can actually live with. The name stayed. So did the gesture.
Lighting design usually hides the mechanism and sells the glow. Here the mechanism is the whole pleasure: a shade you lift, a room that arrives in stages, a little bit of theatre without any extra parts. For more lamps that treat light as an object, see our guide to the best design lamps, and for another studio pushing form into something you can hold, read about the Rollo Studio U collection.
