Header: Mark Cocksedge
The Purple 14p is a whimsical portable light made from a sphere of hand-cast glass that turns lilac, pink or grey-blue depending on the light around it. Vancouver studio Bocci launched it on the 12th of September at the London Design Festival, inside “Labyrinth Dreams”, an installation by British designer Bethan Laura Wood. It was open until the 20th of September at 15 Bateman Street, as part of the Soho Design District, which joined the festival for the first time this year.
From pendant to portable light
Bocci was founded in Vancouver in 2005 by the designer Omer Arbel, and its first piece that same year was the 14, a hanging light made of two cast-glass hemispheres whose edges were left uneven on purpose. The air bubbles trapped in the glass during casting break up the light, so it falls on the room in a ripple effect.
The 14p came out in 2023 as a cordless version of that sphere, having been fitted with a battery that charges over USB-C in 45 minutes. A touch dimmer switches between three levels of light, and on the lowest one, a full charge lasts up to 80 hours. The LED gives off a warm light of 2500K, slightly warmer than an ordinary household bulb, and the lamp is rated IP55, which means it is sealed against dust and jets of water.
“It’s like carrying a bowling ball. It’s solid glass, which is the reason it doesn’t break when you knock it about or drop it.”
Omer Arbel
Neodymium glass
The new purple version is cast in neodymium glass, which Bocci also calls Alexandrite glass, sharing its name with alexandrite, a gemstone that changes colour with the light as well. The glass is coloured with neodymium oxide, which absorbs certain wavelengths of light, so the colour it shows depends on the wavelengths each light source emits.
In daylight and under warm bulbs it looks lilac or pink, while cool fluorescent tubes turn it a smoky grey-blue. The purple joins the four colours the 14p already came in: clear, sepia, grey and yellow.
The Bowie Ball
When Wood first saw the purple light, it reminded her of Labyrinth, the 1986 film in which David Bowie plays Jareth, the Goblin King, so she nicknamed it the “Bowie Ball”. Jareth rolls and balances crystal balls in his hands throughout the film, although the tricks were performed by the juggler Michael Moschen. A very interesting fun fact is that Moschen stood behind Bowie during filming, so he did those tricks without seeing his own hands.
The story follows a teenage girl, played by Jennifer Connelly, who has to cross a giant maze to get her baby brother back from Jareth. That maze became the plan for the installation.
The totems on Bateman Street
Wood designed the space as a maze of colourful totems, each topped with a group of Purple 14p lights, which visitors walked through. The totems were given a soft, semi-matte finish so that the light coming through the textured glass bounces off their surfaces.
According to Bocci, the studio chose Wood for the launch because it wanted a designer closely tied to art and design in London, where she has run her own studio since 2009. Bocci has shown work in the city before, having hung 280 glass pendants through the Grand Entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013 and hundreds of poured aluminium forms by Arbel in the Barbican’s foyer in 2016. In 2022, the brand set up a temporary glass workshop in the V&A’s John Madejski Garden, where pieces were made in front of visitors.
“Bethan is fascinated by the way objects can carry memory, how something as simple as a colour can resonate on a deeply personal level. That’s what happened with the 14p purple: a colour connected with a specific place, and this evocation of memory and atmosphere carries through into the installation.”
Johannes Schoen
Project information
Lighting Design Company: Bocci
Lead Designer: Omer Arbel
Installation Design: Bethan Laura Wood
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date: 2026
