At some level this turns into an accessibility and comfort issue. People with limited vision can take strong advantage of well placed lights. Highlights and shadows are some of the most fundamental elements of human visual perception. Without them our brain needs to work overtime to analyze a given scene.

But honestly, I'd love for the entire ceiling to be one controllable light source. That would be perfect.

One of my recent favourites - Le Soleil by Foscarini - https://www.foscarini.com/en/product/le-soleil-std-s-en/

It's wonderfully asymmetrical without overdoing it, with every layer suspended and swaying independently when prodded. Exceptional light distribution.

Brought me joy as Kondo would have said

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5LS2KQW

I don't know how honeywell of all companies is selling this, but I figure they have engineers that they turned loose on and got out of their way.

It is just super nice. Elegant looking, not expensive, very high quality illumination that can get bright, smoothly dimmable with a knob. a knob to adjust lighting is a good design.

In comparison, dyson makes a lamp that is the same kind of interesting genre, but they cost 10-20x.

[1] except to turn it off is inelegant - you have to press and hold instead of tap, because tap changes color temperature.

I love the reference to Druk/Another Round in the section on the Louis Poulsen PH 5. Such a great film.

Probably way less stable than the real deal.

We have a couple of the marset lamps that we enjoy as well. The sort of low-poly design is really fun.

It's an Ikea Torchère: kinda old now, just halogen, but I've always kept a spare "bulb" for it somewhere - replaced it every 10-20 years. I still like the weird pattern on the ceiling. :P

My articulating desk lamp was balanced for incandescent bulbs. The LED ones are heavier and pull it down.

In addition to these also a huge fan of Anglepoise desk lamps, Lotte lamps and Mantis sconces.

And because I hate to have only LED lighting, I stick good old (but brand new) incandescent bulbs in my "ice cube" lamps: such bulbs go by many names and can still be found (they're either for ovens [where they can sustain insane heat], for warming terrariums, for heating lava lamps, etc.).

Just having one or two incandescent bulb in the living room, in addition to LEDs, works wonder to give a cozy ambiance.

I'd say it's a bit sad to have lamps from the 70s but then stick cold LED bulbs into them (and, yes, even "warm" LEDs do feel incredibly cold): put incandescent bulbs and experience them at they were meant to be (once again: no need to replace the entire house with incandescent bulbs, just two or three here and there shall work wonder).

> Fun fact: “Akari” means light in Japanese, both as illumination and as lightness.

Wow! I love it when two languages have matching homonyms. I always wonder "what does it mean ?". Like, in English "second" to mean the unit of time and the place after "first" feels like two distinct usages. But it's the same in Spanish ("segundo"), which points to a deeper connection (and isn't so unsurprising given the shared roots of the languages): the unit of time is called that because it's the second subdivision of an hour.

The two usages of "light" in English are so distinct I'm quite surprised it's like this in the entirely unrelated Japanese language. Is this just a big coincidence, or does anyone know any deeper reasons here?