A good chair gives you somewhere you can sit, but a lamp beside it gives you a reason to do so...
There are chairs, and then there are places you actually want to sit. The difference is not always the chair.
After all, you can have a perfectly lovely armchair sitting in the corner of a room, beautifully upholstered, nicely proportioned, perhaps even adorned with a splendid cushion… and yet, somehow, nobody ever sits in it.
Put a lamp beside it, though, and suddenly it has a purpose. It miraculously becomes the chair where you read, or have a cup of tea, or lounge with a drink after dinner… or disappear to while everyone else is watching something terrible on television.
Or to put it another way, the lamp has turned a chair into a place.
Put the light where the life is
When we think about lighting a room, we tend naturally to think about the room as a whole: how bright should everything be, and are there enough lamps, and have we illuminated the corners sufficiently?
All perfectly sensible questions, but there's another way of approaching it, which is to start with what people actually do in the room. Have a think about where they sit, read and talk… Where does someone curl up while everyone else is doing something else?
Once you’ve worked that out, you can put the light there.
A lamp beside a chair is perhaps the simplest expression of this idea. Instead of trying to light an entire room evenly, you create a small pool of useful, flattering, inviting light around the person sitting in it. Thus, this particular bit of it becomes yours.
A little island of light
There is something wonderfully intimate about bringing light down to sitting height.
Whereas ceiling lights illuminate spaces rather than the small areas in which people actually settle down, the light from a floor lamp or table lamp belongs to the patch of room immediately around it.
That pool of light gives a chair a kind of boundary; it creates a small territory within the larger room.
This is one of the reasons rooms with several lamps often feel so much more inviting in the evening than rooms relying on one central light. They contain places within places: a lamp beside the sofa, another on a console, another next to a chair, and your eye moves between them, giving everything a feeling of life and inhabitation.
The reading chair, whether you read or not
The classic version of all this is the reading chair: deep armchair, good lamp, little table, perhaps a pile of books… It's an enduring combination because it suggests something more than reading. A chair with its own pool of light feels like a little retreat within the room.
That is one of the pleasing things about lighting: it can change the way a room is used without requiring anything remotely resembling a redesign. A chair that previously felt decorative can suddenly become somewhere people choose to go.
And if you genuinely are reading, you want the light falling where you need it rather than shining into your eyes or leaving the book in shadow, so a floor lamp with a shade that directs light downwards can work beautifully, as can a table lamp positioned slightly behind or beside the chair.
But there's no need to get too hung up on creating the technically perfect reading station. The best sign that you've got it right is simply that somebody keeps choosing to sit there.
Don't match the lamp to the chair too carefully
There is also an aesthetic pleasure in the lamp-and-chair pairing because, sitting so close together, they become a little composition of their own. As with most things in a home, that composition is often more interesting when the relationship isn't too obvious.
A large, traditional armchair can look wonderful beside a slender contemporary floor lamp, while a plain linen chair can take a boldly patterned shade and a brightly coloured lamp can wake up an otherwise restrained corner.
It's worth watching out for scale: a tiny lamp beside a huge armchair may look a little sorry for itself, while a gigantic shade hovering over a delicate chair might look like the furniture is about to be eaten. But beyond that, there’s plenty of room for instinct.
Try moving lamps around, stealing one from another room or swapping the shade. The fact that lamps are so easy to move is one of their great virtues: you can experiment without making any irreversible decisions.
Start with one corner
If a room isn't quite working, it can be tempting to stand in the middle of it and consider the whole thing as a problem. Sometimes that's necessary, but often the better approach is to choose one corner and make it deliciously irresistible.
Find the chair you'd like people to use, put a lamp beside it and perhaps add a little table. Give the light something nice to fall on to: a picture, a stack of books, a colourful cushion or a wall with a bit of texture, and then turn the big light off. You may find that the room starts naturally arranging itself around that little pool of light.
Ready to make your own perfect chair and light combination? Browse all of Pooky’s lights and shades here.