The best floor lamps for a living room

A living room floor lamp gets bought to fix a room and then placed wherever there is space for it. That ordering is backwards, because a floor lamp is not really lighting a room - it is lighting an arrangement of furniture that occupies part of one.

The room total still matters as a budget, and it comes from the usual arithmetic. But once you have it, the question becomes which of two jobs this lamp is doing, because they want different products in different places.

• Carrying the room. An uplight in a corner, bouncing off the ceiling, doing most of the ambient layer. This is the job in a room with no ceiling fixture, or one where the overhead light is unpleasant.
• Lighting a seat. A directional lamp beside a chair or the end of a sofa, for reading. Far less output, aimed precisely.

Buying the second when you needed the first is the most common mistake in this category, and it produces a room with one well-lit armchair and three dark corners.

Brightech Sky torchiere - the pick. 2,190 published lumens at 3000K from an integrated LED aimed at the ceiling. It is the rare floor lamp that publishes its output at all, and 2,190 lumens is enough to carry the ambient layer of an average living room from one corner.
Cons: CRI is not published, which for a room's main light source is a real gap; the integrated LED means you cannot change the color temperature; and 3000K is slightly cooler than the 2700K this site prefers for living rooms.

SUNMORY torchiere - for a large or dark room. 3,000 listed lumens with stepless dimming and switchable color temperature. The combination that lets one uplight serve a room from morning work to evening wind-down, and the extra output matters in a room with dark walls that absorb rather than reflect.
Cons: CRI not published; the output is a listing figure rather than a manufacturer specification; and at 3,000 lm it needs the dimmer to be usable in the evening.

Brightech Trilage arc - for light over a sofa. Three standard sockets on an arc, so the base stands at the edge of the room while the heads reach out over the seating. Standard sockets mean you choose the bulbs - put 95 CRI bulbs in it and it beats every integrated-LED lamp here on color.
Cons: publishes no output because there is nothing to publish; you buy three bulbs separately; and the heads hang at seated eye height, so the bulbs must be dimmable or shaded.

Globe Electric 71 in. - the budget uplight. A 71 inch dimmable torchiere, Energy Star listed. Tall is genuinely useful in an uplight, because the higher the source the wider the bounce across the ceiling.
Cons: neither lumens nor CRI nor Kelvin is published, which in a lamp meant to carry a room means you cannot plan around it. Buy it where the room is already adequately lit and you want more, not where you are fixing a dark room.

Uplights go in corners. A corner gives you two walls and a ceiling within a few feet of the source, so a large fraction of the light bounces back into the room rather than disappearing. The same lamp in the middle of a wall lights one ceiling patch. This is the highest-return placement decision in the whole hub, and it is free - the full reasoning is in where to put a floor lamp.

Two in opposite corners beat one anywhere. Same total lumens, half the peak brightness at each source, no dark end of the room, and much less glare. It is the distribution argument this site makes everywhere, and a living room is where it pays most - see glare and visual comfort.

Check the ceiling before buying an uplight. Uplighting depends entirely on a pale ceiling to bounce off. A white ceiling returns most of what you send it; a dark, timber or sloped one absorbs or redirects it, and in that case a shaded lamp at seated height does more for the same money.

Buy dimmable. A lamp sized to carry a living room is too bright for most evenings, and a single-brightness lamp gets switched off rather than turned down. Where a lamp is not dimmable itself, a plug-in dimmer solves it for very little.

And check the bulbs you already own first. Five sockets holding 450 lumen bulbs is 2,250 lumens; the same five at 800 is 4,000, for the price of a multipack and no new lamp at all - see lumens vs watts.