Lighting the way you want it

I think most of us have had the experience of moving into your first apartment. Underfurnished. Underlit. Figuring out which lightswitch controls the one socket where you plugged in a torchiere lamp you picked up from a box store. It felt very… standard.

Well, nowadays, if you’ve got a room that needs light, you’ve got better options. Nanoleaf is a provider of a variety of wall-mounted home decor, but their flagship product is a grid of hexagonal wall panels that can change color and glow.

On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but here are the key factors that make it a game-changer.

First, the colors are independently controllable. You can turn the grid’s hexes to any color independently, not all or nothing. They can flash, blink, fade in and out, and you can download preset tableaus that adapt to the unique arrangement of hexes you’ve designed (they plug in whatever patterns you want as long as a pair of sides line up). They can even change color in response to sounds (music, stomping, clapping, car doors slamming outside…)

Second, they actually light up a room. Plenty of decorative lights are just an accent. Nanoleaf is bright enough that, if you want them to, they can be a room’s primary light source. You don’t have to balance practicality with coolness; you can do both at once. A single panel isn’t crazy bright, but they come in kits with several panels each, and I’d call a single kit roughly the brightness equivalent of your average lamp.

Lastly, and most importantly, THEY ARE FUTURISTIC. You feel like you’re in a sci-fi environment when the wall is glowing and pulsing colors according to your artistic whim. You can put it into white or a warm yellow for serious occasions and flip it to party or game night with the tap of an app. You can opt for a falling pattern of blues and grays to match the mood of a rainy day, crank up the saturation and match the beat for disco effects, or select a color scheme to match any holiday (and maybe retire the box of tangled fire-hazard string lights you drag out of the attic once a year).

If you have a wall and want light, Nanoleaf is a great 21st Century solution to a 5,000 BCE problem.