Floor lamps for apartments and renters: small footprints, no wiring
Floor lamps for small spaces, apartments and rentals: the floor each lamp takes, from the Chandelle's 20cm to the big arcs, light over the sofa with no ceiling wiring, what each lamp weighs on moving day, and a room-by-room plan for a studio.
A rented flat usually comes with one light per room, in the middle of the ceiling, on a switch by the door. It is bright where nobody sits and dim where everybody does, and the lease would rather you left the walls and ceiling alone. A floor lamp for renters asks nothing of the building: it plugs into a power point, stands on its own weight, and when the lease ends it goes down the stairs with the couch. This is our guide to floor lamps for small spaces, apartments and rentals: the floor each lamp takes, light over a sofa with no ceiling wiring, weights for moving day, and a plan for a studio. We draw every lamp in our Auckland studio and make them at our own factory; the numbers are the listings' own.
What a floor lamp asks of a rental: nothing
Every lamp in our range runs on 240V, is double insulated, and plugs into an ordinary power point. Nothing is fixed to a wall or ceiling. The Orsay page says it plainly: hanging light over a couch usually means an electrician, a ceiling rose and a patch job on the plasterboard, and the Orsay gets there with a plug. The Flore and Trilogy listings both open with the renter whose ceiling has no wiring above the couch.
Switching happens at an inline foot switch on the cable, the same on every lamp we make. In a small room that matters: the lamp can sit in a gap too tight for a hand and still go on with a toe. None of our lamps dims, and every lamp takes a standard E27 globe, not included.
A floor lamp asks nothing of the building. It plugs in, stands on its own weight, and leaves with you.
Footprint first: the floor each lamp needs
For floor lamps for small spaces, footprint comes before height or brightness. The patch of floor the lamp takes is coming out of somewhere else: the gap beside the sofa, the strip between the wardrobe and the wall, the corner where the laundry basket lives. Measure the gap before you fall for a shade.
Every listing gives an assembled width and depth, and the range is wide: the Chandelle takes 20cm by 20cm, the smallest footprint we make; the Vienna is the widest lamp in the table at 109cm, and among the arcs the Cosmo is widest at 102.7cm, which its listing calls not a lamp for a tight corner. The Marceau, Rousseau, Orsay and Cosmo listings define width as base edge to shade edge, the real floor the lamp occupies; the others give assembled width and depth without saying how. The table is the whole range by floor space, smallest first, each figure from its live listing. Where a listing gives no base size the cell names the base instead, and the Camille's weight is not listed.
| Lamp | Floor space | Base | Height / weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chandelle | 20 × 20cm | 20cm disc | 166.8cm 2.5kg |
| Solara | 40 × 40cm | Round brass | 173cm 4.8kg |
| Camille | 40 × 40cm | Round gold | 173cm not listed |
| Voltaire | 45 × 45cm | 25.5cm disc | 176.1cm 4.6kg |
| Aurelia | 46 × 34cm | 25cm brass | 156cm 3.7kg |
| Rousseau | 48.6 × 32cm | 25cm iron | 169cm 5.6kg |
| Marceau | 49.3 × 30cm | 25cm disc | 163.5cm 3.1kg |
| Orsay | 71.5 × 25cm | 25cm iron | 173cm 5.6kg |
| Flore | 99 × 40cm | 28cm marble | 195.7cm 6.6kg |
| Trilogy | 100 × 100cm | Weighted metal | 195cm 7.15kg |
| Cosmo | 102.7 × 32cm | 32cm marble | 183cm 9.7kg |
| Vienna | 109 × 30cm | White marble | 168cm 6.35kg |
Read down to the Marceau and the pattern is clear: seven lamps live under 50cm of width, and five of them weigh under 5kg. Below that line the Orsay is the small-room arc, and the Flore, Trilogy, Cosmo and Vienna want a room with room; the Vienna listing says so itself: not a lamp you pick up and move around, too heavy for a small studio or bedroom, a statement lamp for a room that has room.
The 20cm lamp, and the gaps it was made for
The Chandelle was drawn for the spots that stay dark because nothing fits there, and its listing names them: the gap beside the dresser, the hallway corner, the sliver of wall behind the door. The base is a weighted disc 20cm across, everything above it runs dead straight, and the lamp never leans into the room the way an arm or an arc does, so there is nothing to bump in the dark. It is the slim floor lamp of the range, and at 2.5kg the lightest of the lamps that list a weight.
What it gives back is a line of light rather than a spot. The shade is a beige linen column, 16cm wide and 40cm tall, and switched on the whole column glows top to bottom. In the skinny hallway of an older flat that reads as a soft vertical stripe on the wall. Beside a bed, on the side where a table lamp has no table, it does the bedside job without the bedside table. The listing's advice: if a floor lamp has never worked in your space, measure out 20cm and have another look.
Light over the sofa, no ceiling rose
The one thing a rental lounge room usually lacks is light from above the seat, the job a pendant does in a home you own. An arc lamp is the plug-in version, and in a small flat the question is which arc. The Orsay reaches about 46cm from the pole to the centre of its 25cm gold dome, enough to clear a sofa arm and float the dome over the end seat. All up it takes 71.5cm of floor width, base edge to shade edge, and its listing's advice is to measure that gap first. Its 25cm base tucks in behind or beside the furniture.
The bigger arcs were drawn for bigger rooms: the Flore takes 99cm of width, the Trilogy a 100cm square of floor, and the Cosmo wants 2.7m of ceiling to feel proportioned; the Trilogy listing itself points smaller rooms back to the Orsay, which gives the same light-from-above feel at a much smaller scale. In a flat with a 2.4m ceiling and a two-seater, the Orsay is the apartment arc. Our arc floor lamp guide has the reach maths and the tape-on-the-floor method, and the arc floor lamp collection has all four.
Lamps that move house with you
A floor lamp in a rental will move at least once, probably up a stairwell, and the table has the number for that: the lamps under 50cm wide run from 2.5kg to 5.6kg, with the weight low in the base. The Rousseau's iron base carries a 2.5kg counterweight inside it. The marble-based lamps are a different carry. The Cosmo is 9.7kg assembled, with a 32cm marble base doing the counterweighting, and the Vienna's white marble base is 6.35kg on its own. They are made to stay put, which is their virtue in a big room and their cost on moving day.
Every lamp arrives in a single carton, and the carton size tells you how small the lamp packs: the Rousseau's is 41.5cm by 33.5cm by 19cm at 6.1kg. Keep it and its inserts. On moving day our general advice is simple: take the globe out, coil the cord, wrap the shade, keep the base down, and put the lamp back in the box it came in, so it travels the way it arrived, nothing rattling in the back of a borrowed ute.
An apartment floor lamp plan, room by room
The plan is short. In a studio, one lamp in the corner between the bed and the seat can do both jobs; in a one-bedroom, one lamp beside or over the sofa and a second beside the bed. Start with the seat. The sofa lamp is the one you will use most, and in a two-seater room the choice is between a short-arm lamp parked beside the seat and an arc over it. The Rousseau's bridge arm carries its shade about 26cm sideways, a nudge rather than a stretch, so its listing says to park it beside your seat rather than over it, and the open weave throws a warm pattern onto a plain plaster wall: texture you can switch on in a room with no wall left for art. How many lamps a lounge room wants, and where each goes, is the subject of our lounge room floor lamp guide.
Then the bed. In a one-bedroom the lamp beside the bed is often the only lamp in the room, so it should light the room as well as the pillow. The Aurelia is 156cm tall, the shortest lamp we make, with a shade on a gooseneck that tilts, so the glow can be turned toward a bedside table; its listing calls it ideal for a bedroom where you want the corner lit but not spotlit. The Chandelle does the narrow side of the bed. Our bedroom floor lamp guide goes through glare from the pillow and the lamps that avoid it.
For that single studio lamp, the Rousseau and the Aurelia lean toward the seat and the Chandelle lights a wall. A dark entry is the last spot, and the Solara's listing names an entryway console and the end of a hallway as its places, on a slim 40cm footprint. In a room with dark walls or black furniture, a modern black floor lamp disappears by day and reads as a line of light at night.
Ceilings in apartments are usually 2.4m, and everything above the Flore in the table sits comfortably under that; the Rousseau listing puts it as filling the corner without touching it. Only the 195cm arcs get close, and our guide to how tall a floor lamp should be has the ceiling maths. Power points in older flats can be few and oddly placed; the Marceau listing gives its cord at 1.8m to the foot switch, so pick a spot within reach of a point.
Choose by sentence
If all you have is a strip of floor the width of a dinner plate, choose the Chandelle. If you want light over the sofa with no ceiling wiring, choose the Orsay, and measure 71.5cm first. If you want one lamp beside the seat that also warms the wall, choose the Rousseau. If the lamp will live beside the bed and double as the room's light, choose the Aurelia and tilt it. If you expect to move more than once, favour the lighter lamps at the top of the table and leave the marble bases for the home you buy. Every one of them is in our floor lamp collection; for a reading chair in a small room the reading floor lamp guide covers where the light should land, and our guide to choosing a floor lamp starts one step earlier.
A few questions, answered
What does "double insulated" mean on a plug-in floor lamp?
Every lamp in our range is listed as double insulated: the live parts inside are separated from anything you can touch by two independent layers of insulation, so the lamp does not rely on an earth connection for safety. It still needs only a working power point, and nothing is fixed to the building.
Can a floor lamp replace the ceiling light in a rented lounge room?
For evening light, often yes. A ceiling light lights the room from the middle; a floor lamp lights the place you sit, from beside or above the seat, at a warmer level, and the switch is at your feet rather than by the door. Keep the ceiling light for finding things and cleaning, and run the lamp for everything else. The globe sets the brightness, so choose it for the job.
Should a floor lamp base sit on a rug?
Fully on or fully off, never half and half. A weighted disc base wants a flat floor under all of it; with one edge on a thick rug and the other on the boards, the lamp rocks and the pole leans. A flat-weave rug is fine if the whole base sits on it, and the cord is better off the rug, routed along the wall. That is our general advice for any floor lamp.
Where should the foot switch sit in a tight room?
Where a toe can reach it without moving furniture: on the cable between the base and the power point, just past the edge of the sofa or the foot of the bed, in plain sight. From a narrow gap, run the cable out along the skirting and leave the switch at the open end, never under a rug or behind a door.
Do floor lamps arrive at full height?
No. Every lamp in our range arrives in a single carton a fraction of its assembled height and goes together at home: the Chandelle, 166.8cm tall, comes in a 41.5cm carton, and the Flore's 195.7cm arc arrives flat packed and assembles into its curve. The carton weights in the listings are the packed weights, and those are the numbers to use when planning stairs or a lift.
Is an arc floor lamp too big for an apartment?
Only the big ones. An arc lamp's width is mostly air over the sofa, not floor you lose, so what needs a home is the base, and the Orsay's sits behind or beside the sofa arm on 25cm of floor. The Flore, Trilogy and Cosmo all take 99cm or more of width and were drawn for bigger rooms. Then ask whether the end of the sofa is really where you want the light.
