Why are table lamps so small now?

It's Joe Biden's fault. Trying to make everything energy efficient. Now we have toilets that don't flush, low water pressure, and tiny table lamps.

I've moved on from large lamps to lighting solutions that are subtle, elegant, timeless, and reflect my priorities in life.

They are for ambient lighting. People read on their phones or tablets so no need for huge reading lamps anymore.

My lamps, in both the living room and the bedroom, are Wedgwood. Very classic in design. I inherited one of the living room lamps from my Great Aunt Lil, and I bought the others to match on eBay.

Most new lighting is wretched.

Because more little people can afford apartments and homes now, and they need furnishings and light, too, OP. ☺️

My late mother left me two lamps from Charles Sucsan. One large, one small. Love both.

You can find them at thrift stores. I had a huge all white pottery gingerjar that I loved so much. I knocked it over during a cleaning frenzy.

Italian designers in the late 60s were churning out the coolest lamps. I have the Serpente by Elio Martinelli on my nightstand. It kind of reminds me of a glans and urethra.

It's a curious thing. In the 1960s and 1970s, if you had a largish house you could spend five or ten minutes a night turning off lamps behind going to bed. There were floor lamps, big proposing (or preposterous) table lamps with sculptural dimension, task lighting at desks or reading/work areas...lighting in the sense of furnishing more than architectural was an important part of a room's composition and ambiance.

Big fucking table lamps enjoyed popularity from the 1950s into the 1980s. After that they began to shrink in number and size and presence in a room. People now depend more on overhead lighting, on the glow of TVs and personal devices, reading lamps have been replaced with backlit screens. Increasing people don't want to make string statements in the design of their homes and timidity is the watchword (the safe white and grey world of The Property Brothers is, more or less, a universal aesthetic -- the only question: do you dare introduce "a pop of color" or a touch of the "ironic" in a smirky Jonathan Adler ceramic tray meant to hold nothing?

It really is the lamps that got small. And meek. The 1990s ubiquitous mall store sorts of household furnishings stores, The Bombay Company, the pseudo-English Country shops, Ikea with it small and cheap and "quirky" EuroMod lamps... There were still a fair share of biggish, chunky monochrome ceramic Ming Vase lamps but overall lamps were shrinking fast both in size and popularity.

I'm not a big MCM fan nor a minimalist but I like some of the big, bold lamps of the period. I bought a 1970s Jordi Villanova lamp identical to the one on the left, and just looking now see that the leading department store offers a similar, stripped down version (also reduced in size by one-quarter.) The idea isn't dead; it's just a small shadow of its old self.

[quote] They are for ambient lighting. People read on their phones or tablets so no need for huge reading lamps anymore.

Honey, people don’t use lamps just to read. Jesus.

My grandmother had a 4.5’ iron Tiffany table lamp. It was gorgeous and bright. I miss those lamps. Even the floor lamps today are awful. I hate the ones with the switch on the floor. I blame the Swedes with their IKEA nonsense.

R9 But it's so short.