Pantop Ø18 Portable lamp

The elegant Pantop line, designed by Verner Panton in 1980, has long been a staple of the Verpan collection — defined by a bell-like, widely flaring shade mounted aperture-down. The cordless Pantop Ø18 Portable is available in Cream White, Vivid Orange, Cherry Red, Pitch Brown, Night Blue, Dark Teal, Light Teal and Chrome.

Verner Panton (1926–1998) was Danish design's great colourist — a Royal Danish Academy-trained architect who passed through Arne Jacobsen's studio before charting a radically different course through the 1960s and 70s with the Panton Chair, the VP Globe and the immersive Visiona interiors. The Pantop of 1980 shows his late-career discipline: a single archetypal bell form, flared wide and aimed downward, designed to be repeated across an entire family of lamps and animated above all by colour, which Panton always treated as a functional element rather than decoration. VERPAN, the Danish company founded in 2003 to produce Panton's designs faithfully to his original drawings, has adapted the form into this rechargeable Ø18 portable without disturbing its proportions.

At just eighteen centimetres across, this is the Pantop at its most companionable — small enough for a windowsill, a stack of books or the corner of a café table, yet unmistakably a piece of design history. Cordless lamps are quietly transforming how compact apartments are lit: instead of one fixed ceiling light, a portable like this lets you carry a warm pool of light to wherever the evening happens — dining table, balcony ledge, bedside. Pick a saturated shade like Cherry Red or Vivid Orange to punctuate a neutral room, or Chrome to mirror its surroundings. See how it compares in our round-up of the best portable designer lamps, browse the full portable lamp collection, or explore more of the designer's work in the Verner Panton collection.