In Praise of the Strange Lamp

I love lamps.

I love couches and dining tables and chairs, too, but lamps are the thing I can never seem to walk past. In any thrift store, at any estate sale, my eye goes to the corner where the lamps are clustered, cords tangled, shades crooked, a dozen strange shapes waiting to be plugged in.

I have no room to store all the lamps I want to bring home. This has never stopped me from looking.

Two objects in one

Here's what makes a lamp different from every other piece of furniture: it's two things.

During the day, a lamp is a sculpture. Its base is a shape, a material, a color sitting on a table. It can be a column of brass or a lump of ceramic or a chrome swoop from the 1970s or something so odd nobody can tell what it was meant to be.

At night, it becomes light. And light changes everything. It warms a corner, makes a pool on a table, throws a shadow up a wall. A room at night is mostly about where the light is coming from.

So when you choose a lamp, you're choosing two things at once: how the room looks at noon and how it feels at ten p.m. That's a lot of responsibility for one object, and it's why getting it right makes such a difference.

Why strange works

A lot of people play it safe with lamps. They buy a pair of matching table lamps from the same store as the sofa and call it done.

I understand why. But lamps are one of the easiest places in a room to take a risk. They're relatively small. They're easy to move. And because they're two objects in one, a strange lamp can be the thing that gives a whole room its personality without asking anything else to change.

A strange lamp is the kind of thing I mean when I talk about who would have thought that would work? It's often the first thing a guest asks about. It starts the conversation.

The shade changes everything

If you take one piece of advice about vintage lamps, take this: don't judge a lamp by its shade.

Old lamps very often come with the wrong shade, or a damaged one, or a shade that was put on at some point because it happened to fit. A great base under a bad shade looks like nothing. The same base with the right shade can look extraordinary.

So look at the base. The shape, the material, the weight, the proportions. Then imagine it with a different shade: taller, shorter, pleated, plain, a different color entirely. The shade is the easiest thing in the world to change.

Have it rewired

The other piece of advice is practical and it matters: old lamps often need new wiring.

Cords crack and fray over decades. Sockets wear out. Plugs from another era may not be safe. A lamp repair shop can usually rewire a vintage lamp, replacing the cord, socket and plug while keeping the base and its character. It's worth doing for anything you're going to use every day.

Think of it as part of being a good steward. You're giving the lamp a second life, and you want that life to be safe.

Light in layers

One lamp can change a room. Several can transform how it feels.

The overhead light, in most homes, is the least flattering light there is. It flattens everything. A room lit only from above feels like an office.

Lamps at different heights fix that. A floor lamp beside a reading chair. A table lamp on a console. A small lamp on a bookcase, glowing in the background. When light comes from several places at several levels, a room gets depth and warmth and mood.

And because each lamp can be a different kind of strange, layered lighting is also one of the best ways to mix eras in a room without it feeling like a theme.

Sourcing light

At Joey Rose, vintage lighting sourcing is one of my favorite things to do for clients, partly because I'm already looking at lamps wherever I go.

When a client needs light, I'm not just hunting for something that turns on. I'm looking for the object that will sit in their room all day and change it all night. Something with the right scale, the right material, the right attitude. Something they couldn't have found by searching table lamp.

When I text a client a lamp from a thrift store floor, the cord is often still wrapped around the base and the wrong shade is on top. The message is the same every time: ignore the shade. Look at that base.

The corner of the store

If you want to start finding your own, here's my suggestion. Next time you're in a thrift store, go to the lamp corner. Look past the shades. Pick up the bases. Feel the weight. Imagine each one rewired, re-shaded, glowing on a table in your house.

Most of them will be wrong. One of them won't be. That one, bring home.