Friday 20 April 2012

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....


20 comments:

  1. The horse lamp is brilliant! :D
    Now I know what I want for my birthday! But how can I wait until July...

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  2. You could tide yourself over with the pig table, ha, ha!

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  3. That last picture is possibly the greatest piece of photoshopping I have ever seen. Well played!

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    1. It worked better than I thought! I'll be airbrushing Cameron Diaz on the cover of Elle next...;)

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  4. I showed my DH the picture of the horse lamp, and then mentioned the price which totally freaked him out.
    So now my request for an entire set of rainbow mugs doesn't seem so unreasonable (or at least not as bad as a 4000 Euro lamp).

    Seriously - 4000 Euro - that is what we spend on a 2 week family holiday (although it is quite a cool lamp).

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    1. Ha, ha, I have the feeling Stevie would struggle to bring himself to spend that on a 2 week holiday! BTW, I like your style, I have used that method of making other things seem reasonably priced before with varying degrees of success. Not sure I would be able to swing the sudden need for 40 mugs though...might give it a go though.

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  5. What Heather said. And I want one. Maybe if we all clubbed together we could get one to timeshare? I don't mind sticking in 10 euros for it, so on that basis we just need to rally another 397 people.

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    1. I can't imagine it would be that hard to get 397 people to stick a few Euros in. People would be tripping over themselves to give to a good cause like this I'm sure. It'd be like how people all club together and buy a racehorse. Why don't we just do that, have a nice horsey for a while that we can post apples to, then when it's past it's best, we can turn it into a lamp (and get a lifetimes supply of glue EACH- how totally handy!) and we could each get a shot of the horsey lamp for say a year at a time? Does anyone have a horsebox for transporting the lamp around Germany? And is anyone a dab hand at taxidermy?

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    2. Ok actually that's just weird.

      *backs away slowly*

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    3. I know, I'm sorry. My mind always goes a bit mental after too may questions from Hamish and he's really been laying them on thick and fast of late. Like "Why can't you peel the gold off a statue?", "Why do people eat animals on farms but not cats?", seriously, it's killing me, and making my imagination work overtime. Stevie always says that I shouldn't go into things like electro-magnetic plating in my explanations, but I struggle to explain simply without just going "YOU JUST CAN'T!". Seriously, kids are sometimes not fun. I need some easy adult conversation.

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    4. I get some good ones off the kids I speak English with. One of them actually does quite good lines of questioning that I quite enjoy but they always tend to go a bit dark. "Have you ever had a bunk bed?" "Yes, I went to a school where we stayed over night and we had them there." "Was your mum dead?"

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    5. The whole topic of death is very much a favourite amongst the younger members of this household. Orla likes to ask people (like her grandparents) if they know how they are going to die.... ha, ha, ha... I shouldn't laugh. It's Hamish's hard questions that make my mind go crazy, and too much time alone with his questioning is really hard work. And Stevie is the master at passing his questions on to me... grr.

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  6. ha ha, that pic with the horse lamp in is hilarious! If I had a massive room, I'd like a little herd of fake sheep in there and a friend of mine once planned to put a garden shed in his living room. Why not! :)

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    1. Eh? A garden shed? But why?? Storage? Fake sheep, yeah, I get that...

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  7. what an immense lamp! I fear my kids would try to mount it though!

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    1. I thought of that too. It's quite sturdy though. You'd want it to be for that price.

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  8. I straight up LOVE that horse lamp. And 4,000 euro? A steal. Looks great in that picture, really ties the room together.

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    1. Ha, ha, ha! Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what Stevie said! Not.

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  9. DAMN. I never even imagined that lamps that ridiculous (or expensive) existed. I'm in on the horse share, though I suppose I'll have to keep it outside for my year, which might lower the value a bit...

    And Hamish asked you why we don't eat cats? Heh. What did you answer?

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    1. It would look AMAZING hooked up to the front of a wagon. You'd be the envy of the Wagenplatz... maybe. As for Hamish and his never-ending questions, I think I said because the meat/preparation ratio made it not financially worthwhile. Obviously I am not helping. I should have said "Because cats taste of pee-pees" or something. That would probably also work.

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