How to Position a Bedroom Floor Lamp So You Can Reach the Switch from Bed

The room looks right, the light is warm, and you are in bed with a book. Then you want it off — and the switch is a small plastic box on the carpet near the skirting board, on the far side of a lamp you cannot reach.

Bedroom floor lamp placement is usually written as a question about the room: which corner, how tall, how far from the wall. In a bedroom that is the second question. The first is whether you can work it from where you sleep, because a lamp you have to get up to switch off gets used once and then stops being used. This is the ten-minute measuring job that answers it, and it is worth doing before you pick a side of the bed.

Step 1: measure your reach from the mattress edge

Every later decision is measured against this, so do not guess it. Lie on the bed as you actually sleep, on the side the lamp will go, and reach down over the edge towards the floor as far as you can without sitting up and without your shoulder leaving the mattress. Mark where your fingers land, then measure from that mark back to the vertical face of the mattress.

That is your reach envelope: anything inside it you can switch off half asleep, anything outside it means getting up. Measure it with your eyes shut — the number you get groping for something is shorter than the one you get looking at it — and if two people use the bed, take the shorter reach.

Step 2: find where the switch sits on the cord

On a floor lamp the switch is almost never on the pole at hand height. It is an inline foot switch moulded onto the cord, meant to be tapped with a toe on the way past — sensible in a lounge, awkward beside a bed. Across our range that is consistent. Aurelia lists the cord, plug and foot switch as the only black parts of the lamp. Chandelle's whole point is that you can toe it on from inside a tight corner. Marceau runs a 1.8 m cord to an inline foot switch, Orsay a black foot switch on the cable. Voltaire runs all three globes off one plain foot switch with no dimmer — worth knowing for a bedroom, because from bed it is three lights on or three off.

What no product page publishes is how far along the cord the switch is fixed, and it varies. Measure it the day the lamp arrives, before you commit: lay the cord out straight and measure from the base to the switch. That figure plus your reach from Step 1 is the whole calculation.

Step 3: check the cord budget between socket and bed

The cord has to reach the socket, and whatever it spends getting there it cannot spend sitting near your hand. Socket first, lamp second, switch last. Stand the lamp where you want it, measure the straight-line distance to the socket, and subtract that from the cord length. What is left is the slack you can arrange on the floor — and the switch has to fall inside the arc from Step 1, with the cord running along the bed rather than away from it.

On a 1.8 m cord, a lamp 1.2 m from the socket leaves 60 cm to play with, which is usually enough. At 1.6 m it leaves 20 cm, the cord is taut, and the switch ends up wherever the tension puts it — against the skirting board. Two rules follow:

• Put the lamp on the socket side of the bed. A lamp on the far side spends its whole cord crossing the room, and a cord across the floor at the foot of a bed is a hazard in the dark.
• Never buy slack with an extension lead. It fixes the reach and creates a worse problem underfoot. Move the lamp instead.

Step 4: check the lamp fits the gap it stands in

Bedside gaps are narrow — the strip between the bed and the wall, or between the bed and a wardrobe door that has to keep opening. A lamp that passes the reach test and then does not fit has solved nothing. Assembled footprints of the floor lamps we hold, at their widest point:

Measure the gap at its tightest point, not at the headboard, and take it with the wardrobe door open. All of these clear a standard 2.4 m Kiwi ceiling.

If the switch will not reach

1. Turn the lamp so the cord leaves on the bed side. Free, takes a second, and it is the fix in most cases — the cord exits the base in one direction and people rarely think to rotate it.
2. Go narrower and bring it closer. If the gap is what holds the lamp at arm's length, a 20 cm footprint sits where a 49 cm one cannot.
3. Move to the other side of the bed, if that side has the socket. Re-run Step 1 for whoever sleeps there.

Three that suit a bedside spot

What this guide does not cover

It is about one thing: working a floor lamp from a bed. Where a lamp goes in a lounge is a different set of rules and lives in our floor lamp placement guide. To test whether a lamp genuinely lights the page, the reading lamp guide has that test. If the cord must cross a doorway or walkway, read the cable management guide first.

Frequently asked questions