Bamboo usually shows up in design as a structural element, furniture frames, baskets, or as a surface veneer. It is almost always treated as opaque, even though it has a natural light-passing quality if you thin it enough. Paardarshi is a table lamp concept that takes that translucency seriously and builds the whole project around making bamboo glow from within, treating the material itself as the optical element.
Paardarshi is a translucent bamboo table lamp that celebrates the natural light-passing quality of bamboo. The designer set out to create a hand-crafted lamp with two functions, a soft ambient mode and a brighter reading mode, and the name, meaning transparent in Hindi, hints at the goal: reveal what bamboo can do with light instead of hiding it behind a shade or treating it like just another wooden tube.
Designer: Ashray Sachan
The early experiments involved splitting bamboo with nodes intact, hand-scooping the inner surface with a half-round chisel, and dealing with cracking when too much material was removed. The designer then moved to a third approach, carving from the outside in to thin and straighten the tube while controlling wall thickness. The aim was even translucency along the length, turning the bamboo wall into a kind of natural light pipe that could diffuse an LED smoothly.
The lamp’s form is simple, a vertical bamboo tube on a base that can be closed for ambient light or opened and angled for a focused reading beam. The designer labels these as reading mode and ambient mode, and the same piece of bamboo is asked to behave differently depending on orientation. The geometry stays minimal, the behavior changes with how you interact with it and where you point the tube.
Inside the tube, the designer carves space to house the mechanism and notes the challenge of fitting hardware into something asymmetric and distorted. A press-fit component with springy arms is developed to adapt to different bamboo diameters, and permanent gluing is avoided. Threaded parts and a fully removable assembly are used so the light source can be replaced, bringing craft closer to industrial design and keeping the lamp serviceable over time.
All that carving and assembly work shows up in the way the lamp handles light. The thinned bamboo diffuses and refracts the LED into a warm, even glow along the tube, while the opening mechanism lets you concentrate that light where you need it. It is less about a decorative shade and more about treating the bamboo itself as the optical element, tuned by hand until it behaves the way the designer wants.
Paardarshi is a workshop project that still carries lessons for real products. It shows that a humble material like bamboo can be pushed into new roles with enough patience and iteration, and that serviceability and craft do not have to be opposites. For anyone interested in lighting that feels alive and repairable, rather than sealed and anonymous, a translucent bamboo tube that glows from within is a surprisingly compelling starting point.
