Wire Ø18 Portable Lamp

Known for its striking open wire frame and luminous dome shade, the Wire Lamp has long stood out among Verner Panton's lighting. Designed in 1972, its blend of industrial materials and poetic form made it an instant classic. Fifty years on, VERPAN brings the unmistakable silhouette into everyday life with the Wire Ø18 Portable — a compact, cordless edition that captures the original's sculptural spirit while adding mobility and a soft, ambient glow wherever it's placed.

Verner Panton occupies a singular place in Danish design history: while his contemporaries refined wood and craft traditions, Panton embraced steel, plastic and saturated colour, treating light itself as a material to be shaped. The Wire series grew out of his fascination with open geometric structures — frames that define a volume without enclosing it, so the lamp seems drawn in the air rather than built. VERPAN, the Danish company founded to produce Panton's designs in close cooperation with his estate, has translated that 1972 idea faithfully into the Ø18 Portable: the same dome-on-grid silhouette, scaled down and freed from the wall socket by a built-in rechargeable LED. It is a rare thing — a genuine design classic you can carry in one hand.

That mobility changes how the lamp lives in your home. In a compact city apartment, where every surface earns its keep, the Wire Ø18 moves from desk to dining table to bedside as the evening unfolds, and steps out to the balcony-side windowsill for a nightcap glow. Its open frame casts a delicate shadow pattern on whatever it touches, so even switched off it reads as a small sculpture. Cluster it with books and ceramics on a shelf, let it anchor a low coffee-table arrangement, or use it as gentle mood lighting for late dinners — the warm, diffused light flatters food, faces and quiet conversation alike. Up to nine hours of runtime means a single charge comfortably covers a full evening of moving it around.

The Ø18 sits naturally alongside the other cordless designs in our portable lamps collection, and if you fall for the wire geometry there are corded siblings in larger sizes among our table lamps. For a comparison of how today's best battery-powered classics stack up — runtime, light quality and design pedigree — see our guide to the best portable designer lamps. However you use it, the Wire Ø18 Portable distils half a century of Panton's playful modernism into a lamp small enough to follow you through the day.

Light source: built-in rechargeable LED. Up to 9 hours at max setting; 7-hour charge. IP20, indoor.