How to Choose a Bedside Reading Lamp: Four Louis Poulsen Designs

A bedside lamp has one job the rest of the room cannot do for it: light a page without lighting the person asleep beside you. Height above the mattress, the way the shade releases light and the switch you reach for in the dark decide whether it works there. Four Louis Poulsen designs answer that question differently.

Where the shade sits above the mattress

Measure from the top of the mattress, not the floor. What matters is the relation between the lower edge of the shade and your eye line when you sit up against the pillows. Keep the shade edge below that line and you see a lit page and a glowing shade; let it rise above the line and you read with the lamp itself in view, which becomes tiring within a chapter.

The four lamps cover a useful spread of heights. The PH 2/1 Table Lamp stands 355 mm tall on a base of Ø 120 mm. The NJP Mini Table Lamp reaches 415 mm and the AJ Mini Table Lamp 433 mm, though both aim their light downwards from a shade you can move, so overall height tells you little about where the beam lands. The Panthella 160 Portable Lamp V3 is the outlier at 241 mm high and Ø 160 mm across, low enough to stay under a seated eye line on almost any bedside table.

Footprint deserves the same attention, since a bedside table already carries a book and a glass. The AJ Mini is the narrowest at 113 mm wide and 183 mm deep, the NJP Mini takes 160 by 160 mm and the PH 2/1 200 by 200 mm. Weight runs in another order: the Panthella is lightest at 0.9 to 1.0 kg, the AJ Mini 2.9 to 3.4 kg, the PH 2/1 3.4 to 3.6 kg, and the NJP Mini a planted 6.4 kg, which lets its arm swing out over the bed without the base following.

Diffuse or directional: two ways to read

Reading light divides into two families. A diffuse lamp turns the whole shade into the light source and washes the corner softly; a directional lamp puts a defined pool on the page and leaves the rest of the room dark. Couples who go to sleep at different hours usually want the second kind.

The PH 2/1 is the diffuse end of the range. Its shades are mouth-blown three-layer white opal glass, sandblasted on the undersides so the light spreads evenly, and they follow Poul Henningsen's three-shade system: curves drawn on a logarithmic spiral reflect light at a constant angle and layer it downwards without glare. The first lamp built on that principle won a gold medal at the Paris exhibition of 1925, and Louis Poulsen has produced the family since 1926. The 2/1 designation marks the smallest table format, a 20 cm top shade over the compact lower shades.

The Panthella 160 Portable is diffuse in a different way. Verner Panton drew the original Panthella in 1971 as a light sculpture in which the trumpet-shaped base acts as a reflector rather than a support, so shade and base bounce light at each other and the lamp glows as one object. Its built-in LED runs at 2.5 W and 2700 K: the lamp you want on for an hour before sleep rather than over a dense paperback.

The AJ Mini and the NJP Mini are the directional pair. Arne Jacobsen designed the AJ lamp in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, where the tilted asymmetric shade echoed the Swan and Egg chairs in the same building. Louis Poulsen reintroduced this guest-room scale for the hotel's sixtieth anniversary in 2020. The shade is painted white inside and tilts through roughly 90 degrees, so you set the angle once and it stays, and it takes an E14 source of up to 20 W.

The NJP Mini is the most adjustable of the four. Introduced in 2022, it scales nendo's architect lamp for Louis Poulsen down to a bedside corner without shrinking the mechanics: two joints, an arm that rotates 342 degrees around the base, and a chimney-shaped head that vents heat while reflecting a trace of light back down the arm. Its built-in LED is 10 W at 2700 K, and aimed properly it lights the book and almost nothing else.

The four lamps side by side

What a cordless lamp changes on a small table

A bedside table is where cables collect, and the Panthella 160 Portable removes one of them. The shade is polymer and the base injection-moulded recycled polymer, the lamp weighs around a kilogram, and it charges over USB-C from an adapter of at least 1.5 A, with a white charge indicator on the base. A full charge runs up to 8.5 hours at full output, several evenings of ordinary use.

Two details make it better beside a bed than most portable lamps. The touch switch sits on the nut at the top of the shade, so you find it by feel rather than hunting along a cord, and a long press locks it against a sleeve or a cat in the night. The other is that the lamp leaves, to the bathroom or a balcony, then comes back.

Switches, cords and the driver behind the table

How you turn a lamp off in the dark is a real design question. The AJ Mini puts a switch on the base, within reach of a hand that already knows where the lamp is, and carries a 2.6 m cord with a plug.

The NJP Mini uses one push button on the head. It fades on and off rather than snapping, dims steplessly from about 15 per cent up to full output, remembers the level you last set, and offers a four or eight hour timer for anyone who reads until they fall asleep. Its cord is 2.5 m, but the lamp uses an external LED driver with a plug, so leave room for that small box behind or under the table.

The PH 2/1 is the traditional one: fixed shades, no dimming built in, and enough weight in the machined brass stem and base to stay where you put it. To vary the level, plan for a dimmer or a dimmable source.

Finish, colour and the rest of the room

All four come in enough finishes to disappear into a bedroom or to lead it. The PH 2/1 offers eight, from high lustre chrome plated and brass metallised to glossy burgundy and pale rose. The AJ Mini offers eleven, including polished stainless steel, pale petroleum and soft lemon. The NJP Mini keeps to seven muted colours such as brown rose, taupe and petrol blue, and the Panthella 160 Portable runs to nineteen.

A pale or opal shade reads as a soft luminous shape when lit, while an opaque or metallised finish keeps the light tighter and the object more graphic by day. If lamps stand on both sides of the bed, matching them is calmer than pairing two designs at two heights, unless one person reads and the other does not.

If the bedroom is also where you work, the same logic scales up. Our guide to designer lighting for small apartments covers these smaller formats across a compact home, and the Table Lamps collection holds the taller versions of the same designs.