I was chatting with Kat Jamieson, founder of lifestyle website With Love From Kat, about her Connecticut renovation when she revealed the sconces in her kitchen weren’t actually wired into the wall. By the time her light fixtures had arrived, Jamieson’s contractor had already closed up the wall where they were meant to be mounted and installed a sleek marble floating shelf. She wasn’t about to have the crew open everything back up again for new electrical. So, Jamieson ended up hanging the fixtures with basic nails and balancing battery-operated puck lights inside. Genius, I thought. “The end result is a kitchen that feels so much bigger, more elevated, open, and inviting,” she told me.
Fast forward two years, I was in desperate need of some warm reading light in the tiny “bedroom” my boyfriend and I share in our alcove studio apartment. But because we’re renting, hardwiring sconces was out of the question. Remembering what I’d learned from Jamieson, we bought affordable brass ones off Amazon, mounted them as-is, and tucked puck lights inside of the shades. The issue? Anytime we wanted to turn the lights on—which was every evening—we had to wiggle the disks out, turn them on, and then carefully balance them back on the spot where a traditional bulb would go. Eight out of 10 nights, they fell out. They became such a pain that we almost never used them.
I was coming to terms with reading in our living room at night when I found out that British lighting brand Pooky sells its products in the U.S., specifically a cordless sconce designed with its own detachable, rechargeable battery. I bought two of them ASAP.
I landed on one of the simpler swan neck designs in an antique brass finish with a six-inch, orange Ikat shade for an especially warm glow. (Because our space is so narrow, I didn’t want the size of the sconces to overwhelm what little wall space we have on either side of our bed frame.) After screwing in the metal bases, we added the core of Pooky’s cordless fixtures: the Genesis cell. The battery offers 15 hours-plus of charge and features a magnetic base so that when you plop it in, it really sticks.
The best part about Pooky’s sconces is we don’t have to touch them in order to turn them on (or even dim them). There’s a remote for that! In our case, there are actually two, and each one comes with a brass cover so they don’t look so tech-y sitting out on our nightstands.
Pooky’s cordless fixtures certainly cost more than our puck light hack. Even with a 20-percent discount code, I paid $278 total, including shipping. But knowing that we can take the sconces with us when we inevitably move into a bigger apartment and use them truly anywhere—on either side of a bathroom mirror, in a dim hallway—made ditching the DIY route worth it.
