Herman Miller Leaf Lamp Full Review
Posted: 10 March 2008 by Adam Vaughan
According to its designers, this desk light is meant to express its magical and sensory variations. We didn't spot any Merlin magic, but it certainly looks pretty in a Star Trek fashion, and the fact that it uses an eco-friendly maximum of 9w -- versus the common 40w of a halogen anglepoise -- made it welcome at SmartPlanet Towers.
Dubbed the Leaf, it's a joint effort by designer Yves Behar and furniture firm Herman Miller, and the basic premise is high style married to low energy. At a metre tall, the lamp is very adjustable and practical, especially compared to some other anglepoises. The bottom blade swivels 180 degrees around in the base and moves forward and back about 30 degrees; the top blade, meanwhile, swivels 210 degrees in a forward arc.
The result is a light that you direct for reading a book or, if the urge takes you, against a wall to create some ambient mood lighting. The best bit is the pivots are easy to move but stiff enough so that you don't need to do the Laurel and Hardy balancing act required by some anglepoise lights. We had it in all sorts of contortionist configurations and it didn't flop.
It's bright enough to read by very comfortably, and you can adjust the brightness by some cute touch sensitive controls on the base. They work well -- you simply slide your finger left or right across one of two grooves. Adjust the right-hand brightness groove and you can go from the max (like a very bright bicycle LED light) to a light so dim you'll barely notice it. On the lower intensity, the power consumption drops to 8w.
The base's left-hand groove lets you play with the temperature of the light. It goes from a cold, almost blue, white light and than gradually warms up to a incandescent and halogen-like warm yellow.
Because the lamp's so low-powered, it doesn't run hot -- the metal gets warm, but nowhere near too hot to touch. The other bonus of the LEDs is that the lamp should run for 60,000 hours at full power. That's 2,500 days or the best part of seven years, which is good, but not as impressive as the 11 years promised by Luminaire's Eco Desk 36 Lamp.
The design was divisive around the offices here, but we really like it. You'll need a suitably modernist and minimalist home to complement it, but it does come in five colours so you can pick and match. We tested the silver version, which proved surprisingly smudge-proof.
Our only real gripe with the design is the base. It looks like the equivalent of a Hollywood computer-generated movie that ran out of money towards the end and had a pixellated, lame SFX finale. The black plastic just doesn't feel in keeping with the rest of the lamp's clean futuristic aesthetic.
The blades themselves are made from aluminium, which is mostly good news but accompanied by some bad on the eco front. Bad because it's a mighty energy-intensive material to extract from the bauxite that you need to mine for it -- it takes about 14,000 kWh to extract a tonne of aluminium (the average UK house uses 21,300 in a year for gas and electricity). Good because Herman Miller's used 37 per cent recycled materials, and recycled aluminium uses about five per cent of the energy required to make virgin aluminium. Good also because it means 95 per cent of the lamp can be recycled when it dies.
The lamp's manufactured, like so many other eco lights, in China's Guangdong province. Herman Miller has visited the factory but doesn't report on working conditions aside from saying that under-18s don't work there. Although ethically the lack of detail there is a disappointing, Herman Miller compensates for it by making furniture with a sustainable twist.
As a company, it also has some comprehensive and concrete eco commitments. In addition to using recycled and recyclable materials, it is cutting out unwelcome chemicals such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and is aiming to blanket-wrap (rather than wrap in disposable packaging) 80 per cent of the products it ships directly to customers.
The factory for the Leaf also has the respected ISO 14000 certification for environmental management. Plus, all suppliers have to be ISO 14000 too.
So, even though we don't quite agree with Herman Miller that the Leaf is a "new experience in light", we do think it's a very fine, very green lamp that justifies its designer price.
Quality
Value
Ethics
Green
