The Melbourne Lamps that started in a Cafe Kitchen
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In cafés across Melbourne, thousands of eggshells are cracked, emptied and discarded every week. For furniture designer Joanne Odisho, they became the foundation for something entirely unexpected.
Her award-winning Mod-u lighting system transforms discarded eggshells collected from local cafés into sculptural, reconfigurable lamps. The shells are sterilised, dried and crushed before being combined with a biodegradable biopolymer, creating a durable composite with an almost stone-like finish.
There are no artificial colours hiding the material’s origins. Instead, each block carries the natural creams, whites and subtle imperfections of the shells from which it was made.
But Mod-u is more than an exercise in material innovation. Its name combines “modular” with “you,” reflecting a design that is deliberately left open to its owner. Individual blocks can be stacked, rotated and rearranged, allowing the lamp to grow, shrink or take on an entirely new shape as the space around it changes.
That adaptability helped Mod-u win the 2026 Australian Furniture Design Award, presented by Stylecraft and the National Gallery of Victoria during Melbourne Design Week. Responding to the theme “Living Well, Living Small,” the piece was recognised for its thoughtful use of space, biodegradable materials and unusually tactile form.
There is also something beautifully circular about the story. A material collected from neighbourhood cafés could eventually return to hospitality as lighting, illuminating the same kinds of communal spaces that supplied it.
At a time when sustainability can feel overly technical or detached from everyday life, Mod-u makes the idea tangible. It asks us to look again at an object as ordinary as an eggshell and reconsider where waste ends and good design begins.
From a discarded café by-product to one of Australia’s most celebrated new lighting designs, Mod-u proves that valuable materials are often already around us. We simply need someone willing to notice them.
