Small Home Gazette, Winter 2022
Light It Right
If you go all in on a vintage style light fixture, do not forget the vintage light bulbs. Or rather, the vintage-look bulbs.
LED lighting has come a long way since the first consumer bulbs were introduced more than a decade ago. In the Summer 2011 issue of this newsletter, I authored an article about the wonders of LED bulbs. In it, I confessed that I’d just purchased my first LED bulb—a 60-watt equivalent for which I paid $40. Yikes.
Fortunately, prices of LEDs have dropped significantly. You can now get a standard, non-dimmable bulb for about $1.
Filament LED bulbs at Home Depot that are “Designed to be seen.”
Even better, you can now get LEDs that mimic clear-glass filament bulbs from the early days of electrical lighting. These LEDs look great in fixtures designed for naked bulbs, without the shield of a shade. In fact, Philips brand now marks the packaging of their LED filament bulbs with the words “Designed to be seen.”
You can find an astonishingly wide selection of vintage-style LED bulbs in big-box stores such as Home Depot, Menards and Lowes. And what you cannot find there, you can find online. There are dozens of websites that sell vintage style LEDs; one that I like is 1000bulbs.com. They have an expansive section titled Vintage LED Filament Bulbs—Incandescent Style, where you can find everything from tiny nightlight bulbs to foot-tall beasts that are decorative elements in their own right.
A portion of the vintage filament bulbs available at 1000bulbs.com.
