One of the ways to know a coffee brewer has arrived is that people start finding other uses for it, ways to integrate it into their everyday lives don’t expressly revolve around making coffee. The Chemex being used as a vase is a good example. The AeroPress for making churros, a Moka pot as an urn. Or using a French press as a swear jar, as in, “I swear there’s gotta be a better way to make coffee than this.” Drop in a quarter.
The latest piece of manual coffee making equipment to arrive is the Origami Dripper, which thanks to a new Kickstarter campaign, has been transformed into a lovely little table lamp.
The Origami Dripper is already much loved for its versatility. The ingenious design allows it to be used with both cone and flat bottom filters, creating a range of flavor profiles from a single brewer. And to the list of versatile attributes you can now add “lampshade”. Created by Tokyo lighting design company Gram Eight, the Origami Lamp is a portable coffee accoutrement for your home décor. Weighing just over a pound, the Origami Lamp is cordless and runs on a rechargeable lithium ion battery, meaning you can put it anywhere in the house. The battery lasts anywhere between seven and 100 hours, depending on the brightness setting.
It features continual, stepless dimming and is available in 30 different combinations. The base finish comes in brass or copper, and you can choose from 15 different Origami color options: five matte finishes—pink, green, blue, beige, and grey—as well as purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, black, navy, white, green, and turquoise.
And what is perhaps the coolest feature, you can still use the Origami as a coffee maker. The dripper is interchangeable and using it as a lampshade doesn’t void its original purose: making coffee.
With three weeks left in the still new campaign, the Origami Lamp has yet to reach its ¥300,000 goal ($2,021 USD). Which means there are still rewards aplenty, including a super early bird discount price of ¥19,250 ($130 USD), for a base finish and dripper color combination of your choosing, 30% off the MSRP.
I can personally think of no greater lamp to use when burning the midnight oil to pore over complicated tomes on extraction theory. Because once you’ve finally read one too many contradictory things and decide to give up, at least you’ll have a coffee brewer ready to roll (and pre-heated!). For more information, visit the Origami Lamp Kickstarter page.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
