Posts tagged “west elm”

How Hard is It To Get A Lamp Right?

We’re trying to start 2006 properly lit. We’ve just been suffering from too few lamps with too low wattage. So we got three lamps. One from West Elm we hope will arrive soon. One from Room and Board, and one from Lamps Plus.

The lamp from Room and Board was really disappointing. The whole retail experience is all about calm quality and modernism. The lamp we purchased was a Kovacs product (or so we see on the box) complete with a tag inside filled with purple prose about the future legacy we’ve purchased (I kid you not) and then followed by impenetrable instructions on a piece of photocopy paper. I guess the brand design stops at the labels. Anyway, the legs were not assembled properly and screwed together all askew. A crucial part was missing (that we couldn’t tell from the instructions) and the rest of it wouldn’t screw together.

We took it back, and they happily went and retrieved another from the basement. I decided to open it and look for similar warps in the product, and voila, it was also bent. That was their last one; they’ve ordered one to be delivered to us – will it arrive intact? I’m skeptical, we’re 0 for 2.

The LampsPlus lamp (made by Orbit) arrived today. I put it together, plugged it in, looks great. I then go to remove the wrapping from the lampshade, and there’s a gross stain on it. Oops, we’ll have to pack the whole thing up and ship it back for exchange – on our own dime? Or we can take it into a store. It’d be great to just exchange the shade, and not have to deal with taking the whole thing apart, packing it up (in its arcanely efficient way), fitting it in the car, and then taking a new one home and reassembling it. I bet they won’t do that.

Update: the replacement Room and Board lamp was complete but broke during assembly. Still waiting on the replacement shade for the LampsPlus lamp. Sigh.

Series

About Steve