Most rooms are lit from a single point in the ceiling. It is efficient, it is what the builder installed, and it is almost always the wrong light for an evening.
Light from above flattens everything
A ceiling fixture sends light downwards from one source. Every object gets a shadow directly beneath it, and every surface is lit from the same angle. The result reads as functional rather than comfortable. It is the lighting of a corridor or a waiting room, and your eye recognises it as such long before you can explain why.
Light coming from lower down, and from more than one point, does the opposite. It picks out texture, throws soft shadows across walls, and leaves the ceiling dark. The room feels enclosed rather than exposed.
The real culprit is glare
A bare bulb, or a shade that opens downwards, puts the light source directly in your field of view. Your pupils contract to cope with that bright point, and everything else in the room looks darker by comparison. You end up with a space that is technically well lit and still feels gloomy.
This is why the direction a bulb faces matters more than how bright it is. In both of our lamps the LED faces the inside of the shade rather than the room, so light bounces off the glass before it reaches you. There is no hotspot to look at, and no moment where you catch the bulb out of the corner of your eye.
One colour temperature for the whole day is a compromise
Most ceiling fixtures have a single colour temperature, chosen once when the bulb was bought and lived with for years. But the light that suits chopping vegetables at seven in the evening is not the light you want when you are reading at eleven.
A second light source you can change solves this without rewiring anything. Our lamps cycle through warm, neutral and cool white from a switch on the cable, and hold the switch to dim. It is a small thing that changes how a room reads at different hours.
What to do instead, in order of effort
- Turn the ceiling light off first. This sounds obvious and it is the step most people skip. Everything below only works in a room where the overhead light is off.
- Add one light at table height. A nightstand, a desk corner, a shelf. One well-placed lamp changes a room more than three badly placed ones.
- Put a second light diagonally opposite. Two low sources from different directions remove the flat, single-shadow look entirely.
- Bounce, do not point. Light reflected off a wall, a ceiling or the inside of a glass shade is softer than light aimed at you.
- Go warmer as the evening goes on. Many people find a warm white more restful late at night, and it costs nothing to try.
How much light do you actually need?
Less than you would think, and this is where expectations go wrong. An ambient lamp is not a reading lamp for small print, and it will not replace a ceiling fixture when you are looking for a dropped earring. Our Globe runs from 60 to 249 lumens across its dimming range. That is mood lighting: enough to read a paperback comfortably, not enough to light a whole living room.
Knowing that in advance is the difference between a lamp you love and a lamp you return.
Two shapes, same idea
If you want to try this, both of our lamps are built around it. The Macaron is 18 by 28 cm with a sculpted glass shade in six colours. The Globe is a 15 by 18 cm sphere in five colours that spreads light in every direction at once. Both run from any USB power source, so neither needs a socket nearby.