A lamp can change your life? Okay, it’s a bold claim and, at Pooky, we have occasionally been accused of taking our love of lighting to extremes. But hear us out…
The above may sound like a large claim for a fairly small object, and of course we are not suggesting that a table lamp will fix your tax return or turn you into a concert pianist.
And yet what is demonstrably true is that one lamp can transform a room. Anyone who has moved one from the wrong place to the right place knows that suddenly a dead corner can become the main point of the space. Or a chair that nobody used becomes inviting, or a whole part of the house feels warmer and happier.
And the remarkable thing is that once a room changes, what happens in it changes too.
Which is where the ‘change your life’ bit comes in…
Light makes a place to be
A room is a collection of furniture and items, but it's also a collection of invitations, of daily habits and possibilities. The sofa invites you to sit down and relax, and the dining table ought to say ‘gather round’.
However, quite often, those invitations do not really work until the lighting joins in. A chair can be perfectly comfortable, but until there is a warm pool of light beside it, it may not really suggest reading, or lingering, or putting your feet up at the end of the day. A hallway can be well decorated and still feel like a corridor, until a lamp on a console gives it a glow of welcome.
This is why lighting has such disproportionate power beyond simply illuminating stuff: it subconsciously tells you what the room is for.
The smallest big change you can make
Some changes to a home are epic and involve walls coming down and possibly even someone saying the words “structural engineer.”
Lighting, by contrast, is one of the easiest, least disruptive changes you can make to your room, especially since cordless lights came along. And yet it can have an enormous impact.
Lighting can add height where everything is too low, color where everything is too sensible, warmth where things feel chilly, shine where the room needs a lift, or pattern where everything is being a little too neat.
This is not about “finishing touches”, a phrase that can make lamps sound decorative but secondary, as if all the important decisions have already been made. In reality, a lamp can be the thing that makes the rest of the room really start to work.
Move it and see what happens
One of the nice things about lamps is that they allow you to experiment without fear of disaster.
You can try the shade from one base on another, put a lamp somewhere mildly unexpected or let a cordless wander around the house for a few evenings and see where it seems happiest. Often, the right place is not where you first thought.
Lighting is very personal, because there is no single correct answer. You are deciding how you want the room to behave and to feel. Do you want people to gather round the table, curl up in the chair, notice the painting…? A lamp is a way of nudging the room towards the life you want to have in it.
The evening test
In daylight, a room may be carried by windows, color, architecture… But when the sun goes down, lighting takes over, and you find out whether a room has atmosphere.
A well-placed lamp can change the whole performance of an evening: for example, the kitchen table becomes a place to stay and talk long after the food is finished, or the corner chair becomes the curling up spot. Homes change us through repeated little suggestions: pour another drink; put the phone down; enjoy the moment…
Lamps are very suggestive like that.
A little more you
There is another aspect to this, a thing a lamp can do extremely well. That is to make a room feel more personal.
A home with character is full of chosen things: objects that suggest affection, humor, taste, memory, experiment, even the occasional harmless mistake. Lighting is a particularly good way to introduce that spirit because it is expressive: your lamps and shades and lamp/shade combinations are a little manifestation of who you are in your home.
So yes, one lamp can change a room. And once a room changes, the life inside it changes a little too. It might encourage you to read more, linger longer, host more often, make better use of a neglected corner, enjoy your evenings more, or simply feel more at home in your own home.
That is the real power of lighting. It gives you more control over the atmosphere you live in every day.
Have we convinced you? Give it a try and see for yourself.
Explore Pooky’s gloriously expressive lamps and shades here.