There’s a new chocolate cafe in Sacramento! Cafe Xocolatl serves cacao, coffee and tea, and chocolate from around the world.
The owners at Cafe Xocolatl wanted beautiful lighting in their new retail space that evoked the cacao culture. I was commissioned to come up with some ideas, and we settled on pendant lamps that look like cacao pods.
Natural cacao pods are beautiful, with lovely organic coloring and a perfect shape for a pendant lamp. I couldn’t find any commercially available lampshades with this theme anywhere on the web, so I set out to design my own.
I found a 3d scan of a cacao pod online and remixed it until it was the size and shape I was envisioning. I hollowed out the center and made a couple different sizes, for a nice variation in the final install.
This is a VERY big 3d print for a consumer-level printer, so I was a little nervous about whether it would work, but with some help from a friend with a lot of 3d printing expertise, we got them printed out without much trouble.
The final pendant lamps contain RGB LED light bulbs that make the cacao pod lamps glow beautifully, and color-shift gently through the rainbow. I installed them in the cafe and they look really wonderful in the space.
