The Mushroom Lamp Trend: Why the ’70s Icon Is Ruling Interior Design Again

Permit ME introduce you to the the very least-cool identify for a suburb at any time: Pleasantview. That is the place I grew up, in 1970s Canada, in a split-degree with an uncool bogus fire in which my mothers and fathers proudly displayed a guide named “Gnomes.” The only, only interesting thing we owned—sorry, “Gnomes”—was a white, plastic mushroom lamp, the slimmest of connections to overseas principles like grooviness, Studio 54 and Cher. But even its stubby glamour was compromised: It sat on the Television, compelled to coexist with “The Waltons,” surrounded by kitschy collectible figurines: a china shepherdess, a prayerful little one, a buffalo, none of which experienced at any time snorted cocaine with Halston. Continue to, as a kid aspiring to aesthetic sophistication, I disproportionately pinned my hopes on that white, glowing lump of plastic we most likely purchased at Sears.

I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. But on a modern, soggy April day in New York City, where I now stay, I ducked into the MoMA Style and design Store to escape the rain and could not ignore the many, lots of mushroom lamps with their distinct semispherical shades that, priced from $30 to $1,430, experienced sprouted in almost every single corner. And so commenced a quest to discover out how the sole ray of chicness in my oppressively nice childhood has resurfaced as a décor (and social-media) darling in 2022.