First things first. Isamu Noguchi Akari light sculptures belong in the pantheon of perennial design treasures. Elegant, quiet, unimpeachable. Always appropriate, never démodé. They have also become something of a default solution—particularly in midcentury and contemporary homes with soaring ceilings that demand sculptural presence. Walk into enough double-height living rooms and you’ll notice the pattern: Somewhere overhead, an Akari hovers, diffusing light through its paper-and-bamboo shade. But occasionally even the most ardent Noguchi lantern devotees need to find something just a bit, well, different.
Such was the case for Roman Alonso of the AD100 firm Commune Design in his recent rehabilitation of a family home at The Sea Ranch, Northern California’s utopian, landscape-forward community overlooking the Pacific (featured in AD’s January 2026 issue). Alonso had two double-height dining rooms to furnish, and if for no other reason, the scale of the spaces alone discouraged the deployment of standard Akari models.
“Let me start by saying that we are the biggest Noguchi fans on the planet. We use those lights constantly,” Alonso says. “But here, we needed something bigger that still gave us the same incredible quality of light. It was an opportunity to showcase something special, something bespoke.”
For the first pendant, Alonso and his team worked with Kojima Shoten, an artisan workshop founded in Kyoto in the late 18th century during the Edo period, specializing in traditional Japanese chochin (paper lanterns)—the type of craft that originally inspired Noguchi’s lighting experiments. The lantern Commune commissioned, measuring 60 centimeters in diameter and 243 centimeters in height (nearly eight feet), is made of washi paper and bamboo ribbing, just like Noguchi’s designs, but for this piece, large swaths of paper have been stripped away, exposing the bamboo skeleton and further dematerializing the ethereal object.
“This is our very first time to make such an elongated shape more than two meters long,” explains Shinya Takeda, the workshop’s coordinator of international projects. “We had to source a special mold and carefully consider how to realize such an elongated shape from the ground up.”
For the second pendant, which clocks in at eight feet three inches, Alonso commissioned a pendant from contemporary LA-based textile artist Adam Pogue, whose practice is informed by Korean bojagi (wrapping cloth) and other traditional quilting techniques. The fabric is translucent—filtering a subtle glow that highlights the seams of the pieced textiles—and the appliqué design seems to nod gently to midcentury designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s signature graphics for The Sea Ranch.
Of course, Noguchi remains central to Commune’s aesthetic worldview. In a corner of a living room at the Sea Ranch home, a classic Akari floor lamp, model UF4-L5, stands sentinel. Flawless.
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Read more about the history of the iconic Noguchi lantern
