That's a 100 watt horse you got there, cowboy

I feel like our apartment needs more lighting. We have a problem with light in this place. The ceilings are so high, the rooms are big, and frankly we don't have anywhere near enough lamps. We laugh in the face of task-lighting! Recently the bulb in the main overhead light in Orla's room died, and when we Stevie climbed on top of the chair on top of the chest of drawers to change the bulb we discovered that it was a 200 watt bulb. You can't just get 200 watt bulbs in the supermarket or even in Bauhaus. You can get them on the internet but I have been a bit lazy about getting it and I thought a 100 watt bulb would do. Except it's dreadful. It's like weak candlelight. Anyway, I aim to address the lighting situation in this place at some point. And yesterday quite by chance, I found quite the perfect lamp.

You see, I was going to meet a friend and I had some time beforehand so I decided to have a peek inside  Stilwerk on Kantstrasse (o the corner with Uhlandstrasse). I'd always assumed that Stilwerk was one shop, but in fact it's like a rather cool shopping centre for expensive furniture and home decor design shops. I am almost alarmed that given I am a real lover of furniture porn, that it's taken me the best part of 2 years to visit it.

Stilwerk on Kantstrasse

It has a high proportion of shops that normally I only drool over in Elle Decoration, such as Kartell, B&B Italia, Ligne Roset, BoConcept, and a whole bunch of others that I had never even heard of stocking the kind of high-end furniture and lighting that makes me shed little happy tears.

Part of the Brazilian furniture design exhibition, & Kartell.

This chair is so impractical for Brazil. Just think: Metal + intense heat + bare legs + hole pattern = hot fleshy fishnets

Rainbow cups! Rainbow bowls! Rainbow plates!
20 Euros per cup which is bad enough, but when you consider that you'd want to have the WHOLE rainbow, it suddenly doesn't seem worth it to remortgage the house. Sniff.

There is also a great lighting shop on the ground floor which has some really beautiful, eyewateringly priced lamps and lights. But it turns out the also have 200 watt bulbs for just over 10 Euros, which is the best price I have come across. When I came out of there I had a wander round the Brazilian furniture design exhibition they have on view in both the main central walkway and on the third floor. And after that, I just happened to find myself drawn into B&B Italia which is where a rather nice salesman caught me slabbering over a storage system so luscious I would sell Stevie's kidneys to own it, and it was while we were talking I clocked the perfect lamp.

www.moooi.nl

Now let me just start off by telling you that I'm not that into horses. Never have been to be honest. But a horse-shaped lamp that's so absurdly huge, really rocks my world. I even quite fancy having two of them, one at either side of the bed. Can you imagine how useful that would be? You could sling some saddlebags over it to keep your books and stuff in, and instead of flinging your clothes over a chair at night, you've got a whole horses back to fling them on to. You could hang your necklaces round its neck, why, it's sounding more and more practical by the minute! Alas there's no way that Stevie would let me buy two of them. He wouldn't even let me buy one of them. Priced at just over 4000 Euros, it gets vetoed for two reasons, 1) it's 4000 Euros (even though that's a whole lot of lamp for your money and probably (still doesn't) equate to IKEA prices if you work out how much it costs per square cm, and 2) it wouldn't fit into any room in our house back in the UK. But a girl can dream....... can't she???......................................

Ha, ha, ha, yeah, maybe we can't carry it off....