[It's been a minute, but we're still around. More activity over on Instagram, but this post is "blog worthy" due to its length and links. This is a project that has been in the "need to finish" queue for a while and I had to do a repair on our own lamp this weekend, so I finished this off.]
One of the more unusual things in our house is this awesome sculpture/lamp/shade called the "Ventana" by Pablo Pardo. The design is about 20 years old and it's long out of production — it was featured at ICFF in 2002. This larger size retailed originally for about $1200 + tax — crazy, right?
We were able to pick one up for ourselves years ago (we even had it in West Oakland) and we love it. Many year later, we came across a pair of lamps for sale and we snatched them up. They were incomplete, but I figured I could remake them into something close to the originals… and this is the result:
[The Ventana lamp is both a shade and a light (and a sculpture) — it's amazing.]
This one is on a non-articulating walnut mount that extends the lamp about 8in off of the wall. Because of the massive torque on the parts/pieces, it's best suited for a place where it won't get bumped and it must be mounted into a stud or a post (as we've done here). Properly mounted, it's solid as a rock, but I have a 10 year old in the house that likes to break things, so everything comes with a warning-label these days.
The lamp — like a shade — pulls up and down… I think the maximum extension is about 8ft. This version has been converted to modern LED lamps (from the original halogens that ran very hot) — so it runs much cooler and much more efficiently. The lamps are standard 12V MR16, so you could even install "smart" bulbs that could be controlled via app or home assistant ("Alexa — dim shade lamp to 60%"). The lamp is even more safely powered by a supplied 12V/5A power adapter (from the original 120V line voltage) and turns on/off with a foot switch as the original did.
It's a very unique thing that you'll likely not see again, so snap it up while you can.
