Yuh Table vs Floor vs Wall Lamp: Which to Choose

GamFratesi drew Yuh for Louis Poulsen in 2017, and the design exists in three bodies: a table lamp, a floor lamp and a wall lamp. All three share one mechanism, a cylindrical shade that slides, turns and tilts on a brass stem. The question worth answering before you choose is which body suits the corner you already have in mind.

A shade that slides, turns and tilts

The shade is the whole argument. Seen from the front it is a cylinder, circular at the bottom edge and cut to a straight line at the top, and it is not fixed in place. It rides on an extruded brass stem, so you set its height by hand, rotate it through a full circle and change its angle. Push it low over a book and the light gathers into a tight, glare-free cone. Raise it and the same lamp lays down a wider pool across a desk or a console.

A slim opening at the top of the shade releases a softer upward glow, which is the detail that keeps a room from collapsing into one bright spot surrounded by darkness. That balance of a directed downward cone and a quiet ambient wash is the Louis Poulsen habit of shaping light rather than simply housing a bulb, carried forward from Poul Henningsen into a contemporary form. The name is a pun on "you": the lamp is set up around the person sitting next to it.

The controls are the same across the family. A switch sits on top of the stem (on the rear housing for the wall version) and gives stepless dimming from 15 per cent up to full output, plus a timer that can be set to four or eight hours. The light source is a built-in LED of 10 W at 2700 K, warm rather than neutral, rated IP20 for indoor use, with an external driver on a 2.5 m cord.

Yuh Table, Floor and Wall compared

Read down the rows and the family logic is clear: one head, three answers to the problem of holding it at the right height. What separates them is where the weight goes and how much surface you are willing to give up.

What the measurements mean in a real room

The Yuh Table Lamp stands 610 mm tall on a footprint of 200 by 200 mm and weighs 7.9 kg, or 6.7 kg on the marble-base version. Those numbers describe a lamp that is tall for a nightstand and deliberately so, because the sliding shade needs travel to be useful. Measure the depth of your bedside table first: 200 mm of base on a shallow 300 mm top leaves little room for a book and a glass of water. On a desk or a sideboard the same height reads as generous rather than awkward, and the weight keeps the lamp planted when you move the shade.

The Yuh Floor Lamp takes the identical head to 1400 mm on a 240 by 240 mm base, at 11.7 kg (9.4 kg with the marble base). Because the shade slides, the working height is not fixed at the top of the stem. Slide it low next to an armchair and it behaves like a reading lamp at shoulder height. Raise it and turn it towards a wall and it becomes indirect evening light for the whole corner. That range is why a single floor lamp can often replace both a task light and an accent light in a living room.

The Yuh Wall Lamp is the space saver: 626 mm high, projecting 296 mm, and at 4.6 to 4.9 kg the lightest of the three. It gives up nothing in adjustability, since the shade still rotates and tilts on its brass arm, but the wall carries the load instead of a table top. Beside a bed it clears the nightstand entirely. In a narrow hallway or flanking a mirror it adds a directed light where a floor lamp would simply be in the way. Check the 296 mm projection against the walking line before you mark the fixings.

Colours, brass and the marble base

Each version is offered in four finishes: Black, White, Brass/black and Brass/White. The shade and base are wet-painted aluminium, and the stem is extruded brass on every version, painted to match on the black and white lamps and left brushed on the brass ones. On the table and floor lamps the brass versions sit on a marble base, which is also what makes them lighter than their painted equivalents.

In practice the painted versions recede. A black Yuh reads as a line and a cylinder against a pale wall, and a white one almost disappears next to white joinery. The brass versions do the opposite: the stem catches light along its whole length and the marble base anchors the lamp visually, which suits a room that already has warm metals or stone in it. If you are buying two of the family for one room, matching the finish is worth more than matching the type, because the stem is what the eye follows.

Which one to choose

Choose the table lamp if you have a surface at least 300 mm deep and want the light to move between reading and general use. It is the most flexible of the three in a small flat, where one lamp has to serve a desk by day and a sofa by evening.

Choose the floor lamp if the seat you want to light has no table beside it, or if you want one fitting to cover both task and ambient duty in a living room. The 240 mm base tucks behind an armchair arm, and the 1400 mm stem means the shade can drop to reading height and still rise well above head level.

Choose the wall lamp if surface area is the thing you are short of. It is the obvious answer for a bedroom with narrow nightstands, a hallway, or a study where the desk needs to stay clear. Our guide to designer lighting for small apartments goes further into that kind of layering.

All three run on the same LED, the same dimmer and the same four or eight hour timer, so the decision really is about geometry and where the weight sits. See the full Louis Poulsen collection for the rest of the catalogue that Yuh belongs to.