Whether it’s a nightlight for a child or just to create a little ambiance on a mantelpiece, Sara Walker found these little solar powered lamps enchanting.
Litogami is a French company, making ecofriendly products which light up from little solar powered batteries. Put like that, it sounds very dry – but I did love these cute little houses, which would make a fantastic Christmas present.
What you get basically looks like a greetings card – a cardboard, flatpack set with the battery separate in a little envelope. This would fit easily through any letterbox and would be ideal for sending abroad if you had friends overseas.
To assemble it, you snapped the precut shapes out of the cardboard and folded the house together (no glue or scissors required). The snapping out was a little fiddly and wouldn’t be suitable for very young children or toddlers, but otherwise it would be a great activity for an older child on Christmas Day. The light can be charged either by putting it near a window or just under another light source such as a lamp, and it stays lit for five hours (although I accidentally left mine on overnight, and it was still illuminated in the morning!)
Once you flick the switch, a dim, orangey light spills from the open doors and windows of the house to make a nightlight. It’s not bright, but it is very visible and pretty.
These houses are available in a vast range of designs, and there are even some plain ones which you could decorate yourself. The company also make a solar powered cardboard car, which uses its power to move rather than light up!
The houses are priced at 9,90 euros (around £8.40), and I think they’d be fairly robust and would last a while. You could partially disassemble them to put them away (although the battery is stuck into the house fairly permanently, so you couldn’t pack the whole thing away flat) if you wanted to keep them just for Christmas, although I think they look pretty enough to keep out all year round.
I really love this as a concept – how much nicer to receive something like this through the post than a dull card-and-gift-voucher – and it would appeal to adults as well as children. Litogami are adding to their range all the time, so take a look at their latest products on their website at www.litogami.com.
All images (c) 2019 Write Image for you Media.
