Most smart lighting asks you to tap a screen. Billy Easter’s Gel Lamp asks you to pick up a piece of silicone and slide it into place.
The London-based designer has created a compact cubic lamp that changes colour through interchangeable translucent slabs. Instead of switching between presets in an app, users physically insert one of 13 coloured gels into a narrow slot near the base of the lamp, transforming its cool white LED into a different hue.
The idea comes from the coloured filters traditionally used in photography, theatre and studio lighting. Easter translated that familiar production tool into a domestic object, turning a technical lighting method into something tactile and deliberately simple.
That interaction is central to the design. Choosing a colour, picking up the gel and sliding it into the lamp creates what Easter describes as a small ritual. The process adds a moment of intention that disappears when the same action is reduced to a button or digital setting.
The lamp itself is made almost entirely from silicone. Easter produces it using 3D-printed moulds, pouring and curing each component over several days before finishing it by hand. The interchangeable colour panels are made through the same process, with the Public Parts name embossed along one edge.
Its electronics are deliberately accessible as well. Rather than sealing the LED permanently inside the body, the light source sits within a recessed space so it can be reached and replaced if necessary. That makes the object easier to repair and potentially extends its usable life.
The material gives the lamp an unusual balance between sculpture and practicality. Its soft, monolithic shape gives it presence when switched off, while silicone makes it durable enough to handle everyday knocks and easy to clean. Easter sees the piece working in homes as well as hospitality spaces, where colour can quickly alter the mood of a room.
That sculptural quality matters because Gel Lamp is designed to function as an object even when it is not producing light. Its cube shape and slightly unfamiliar material keep it closer to a small piece of furniture or sculpture than a conventional table lamp.
Produced through Easter’s studio Public Parts, the lamp is made in individually numbered limited batches. Each £375 piece comes with two colour gels, with additional colours allowing the same object to shift between very different atmospheres.
Gel Lamp is ultimately built around a surprisingly unfashionable idea: adding an extra physical step to something technology has spent years trying to make effortless. That small amount of friction is exactly what gives the object its character.
