Pantop Ø18 vs Ø23: Portable, Table or Pendant

The Pantop is one form repeated: a wide bell of a shade, flared and mounted aperture down, drawn by Verner Panton in 1980. VERPAN builds it as a cordless portable, as a table lamp and as a pendant, and the three behave differently the moment the light is on. Here is how to work out which mounting belongs over a dinner table, on a shelf, or low above a counter.

One form, three mountings

Panton (1926–1998) trained as an architect at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and passed through Arne Jacobsen's studio before spending the 1960s and 70s proving that Danish design could be loud: the cantilevered Panton Chair, the spherical VP Globe, the walk-in colour worlds of the Visiona interiors. The Pantop of 1980 belongs to the quieter later stretch of that career. It reduces a lamp to a single archetypal curve and then lets colour carry the expression, which fits Panton's long-held view that colour is a functional element of design rather than a finish applied at the end.

The curve does three things at once. It hides the light source from view at sitting height, it directs illumination cleanly downward instead of scattering it sideways, and it holds a sculptural profile from every angle in the room. Because the shape survives a change of scale, Panton drew it as a family rather than as a single lamp, which is why the Pantop Ø18 Portable lamp, the Pantop Ø23 Table Lamp and the Pantop Ø23 Pendant read as siblings rather than as variants of one another. VERPAN, the Danish company founded in 2003 to produce Panton's designs to his original drawings, has adapted the form to each mounting without disturbing its proportions.

The numbers side by side

Dimensions are as VERPAN states them, in millimetres, width by height by length.

The two cordless versions

Both portables share a footprint: 180 mm across, 300 mm tall, 0.75 kg. At that size the Pantop stops being a fixture and becomes an object you pick up, which changes how a flat gets lit. Instead of one ceiling source doing everything, a small lamp follows the evening from the kitchen worktop to the arm of a sofa to the table.

The Pantop Ø18 Portable lamp keeps the construction of the mains versions: a lacquered injection-moulded plastic shade, an opal plastic diffuser, a chrome-plated metal base and a silicone horse-shoe detail where the stem meets it. It comes in the eight Pantop colours, from Cream White and Chrome through Vivid Orange, Cherry Red, Pitch Brown, Night Blue, Dark Teal and Light Teal.

The Pantop Portable is the more technical of the pair. Base, stem and shade are painted polycarbonate, with the dimmer and the top bolt in brushed metal. A built-in 1.5 W LED runs through a three-stage dimmer and gives up to seven hours of light per charge, refilled through a 2 m USB cable, and the IP44 rating covers outdoor use as well as indoor. The palette is wider too: fourteen options including Burgundy, Terracotta, Brass, Dusty Blue, Warm Yellow, Grey Sand, Dark Green and Bright Red alongside matt White, matt Black and matt Classic Blue. If you want the Pantop as a dinner table centrepiece that dims down as the plates are cleared, take this one.

Ø23 Table Lamp: a fixed point in the room

Scaled up to 230 mm across and 380 mm tall, the Pantop Ø23 Table Lamp reads as architecture rather than as an accessory. It is also the heaviest of the four at 2.3 kg, which is the practical argument for treating it as a permanent resident of a sideboard, a desk or a bedside table rather than something you shuffle about. The aperture-down shade drops a focused pool onto the surface below and keeps the source out of your eye line, which is what makes it comfortable for reading and flattering across a laid table.

Its footprint stays modest even at this height, so it suits tight floor plans: little surface area given up, a strong dose of character gained, especially in the saturated colours. On a shelf, the extra 80 mm of height over the portables lets the shade clear books and objects instead of being swallowed by them.

Ø23 Pendant: a low light over a counter

The Pantop Ø23 Pendant takes the same 230 mm shade and turns it into a hanging fixture: 166 mm of shade, 1.25 kg, nothing else competing for attention. This is the Pantop at its most intimate, and the right answer where a full-size pendant would dominate, above a bar counter, a breakfast nook, a small desk or a bedside table.

Hung low, the flared shade behaves as Panton intended. The light lands on the worktop, the glare stays inside the dome, and the coloured exterior does the decorative work at eye level. A run of two or three over a counter, matched or deliberately mismatched, turns an ordinary stretch of worktop into the focal point of the room while leaving every surface clear. Since the shade is only 230 mm wide, the spacing can be tighter than with a large pendant, which reads as rhythm rather than as repetition.

Choose the colour as carefully as the mounting

With the Pantop, colour is never the last decision. Panton drew the family to be read at a distance as a block of tone, so a Cherry Red pendant and a Cream White pendant are two genuinely different objects in the same room. Chrome behaves differently again, picking up whatever surrounds it instead of asserting a hue of its own. Buying more than one? A single colour across mountings makes the family relationship obvious, while a deliberate clash of two saturated tones sits closer to the spirit of the Visiona rooms.

The short version. For a dinner table, take a portable and let it travel; the three-stage dimmer on the Pantop Portable earns its keep across a long evening. For a shelf, a sideboard or a bedside, the Ø23 table lamp has the height and the mass to hold its position. For a counter, the Ø23 pendant does the work with no surface given up at all. If the cable-free option appeals, our guide to the best portable designer lamps sets the Pantop against its rivals, and the full VERPAN collection shows how it sits beside Panton's other lighting.