Turkish Designer Cut 800-Year-Old Islamic Geometry Into a Stone Lamp That Casts Patterns on Your Wall - Yanko Design

Decorative stone carving and electric lighting rarely combine through active design of the material. Prior overlaps used stone as a passive diffuser, such as backlit marble slices and Himalayan pink salt lamps. Islamic geometric traditions have more often appeared in plaster, wood, and tile, which support repetitive fine cutting. Studio Soldout developed Sukun by testing whether travertine could connect these histories. Six Islamic geometric motifs, each tied to a landmark in Konya, Kayseri, Karaman, Cordoba, Valladolid, or Granada, are cut and refined through a travertine disc that forms the lamp top. A concealed rechargeable battery powers an integrated 2700K LED with three-step phase dimming and six to eight hours of runtime. When lit, the pattern projects outward in all directions, transforming the geometry into the environment. Sukun won an A' Design Award in the Lighting Products and Fixtures category for 2025–2026.

"The closest attempts have been thin marble slices backlit into warm translucency, or those Himalayan pink salt lamps that colonized every wellness-adjacent bedroom in the 2010s, both of which use the stone as a passive diffuser, a material you shine through rather than one you design with. The geometric traditions of Islamic architecture, meanwhile, have lived primarily in plaster, wood, and tile, materials that reward the kind of fine, repetitive cutting those patterns demand."

"Six Islamic geometric motifs, each sourced from a specific landmark in Konya, Kayseri, Karaman, Cordoba, Valladolid, or Granada, are waterjet-cut and CNC-refined through the travertine disc that forms the lamp's top. A concealed rechargeable battery powers an integrated LED at 2700K, with three-step phase dimming and six to eight hours of runtime per charge."

"When lit, the pattern projects outward in every direction, the ceiling, the wall behind, the table surface below, turning the geometry from object into environment. Sukun just picked up a win in the A' Design Award's Lighting Products and Fixtures category for the 2025-2026 cycle."

"Travertine is defined by geological accident, by voids and veins left behind as calcium carbonate settled over millennia, and those natural pores sit millimeters away from the machined perforations without any visual conflict. If anything, the stone's inherent texture makes the precision of the geometry feel more earned, the way a hand-laid mosaic reads differently than a printed reproduction of the same pattern."

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