ByLydia Geisel,Photography byBelle Morizio
PublishedFeb 6, 2025 1:45 AM EST
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I was speaking with Kat Jamieson, founder of lifestyle site With Love From Kat, about her Connecticut renovation when she revealed that the sconces in her kitchen were never actually wired into the wall. By the time her fixtures arrived, her contractor had already closed up the mounting wall and installed a sleek marble floating shelf, and she wasn’t about to have the crew reopen it for new electrical. Instead, Jamieson hung the fixtures with simple nails and balanced battery-operated puck lights inside the shades. Genius, I thought. “The result is a kitchen that feels so much larger, more elevated, open, and inviting,” she told me.
Two years on, I was desperate for warm reading light in the tiny “bedroom” my boyfriend and I share within our alcove studio. But because we rent, hardwiring sconces was out of the question. Recalling Jamieson’s workaround, we bought affordable brass fixtures off Amazon, mounted them as-is, and tucked puck lights inside the shades. The trouble? Each evening, to switch them on, we had to wiggle the disks out, power them up, and then delicately rebalance them where a bulb would normally sit. Eight nights out of ten they tumbled out. They became such a nuisance that we largely stopped using them.
I was resigning myself to reading in the living room at night when I learned that British lighting brand Pooky now ships to the U.S., including a cordless sconce engineered around its own detachable, rechargeable battery. I ordered two immediately.
I settled on one of the simpler swan-neck silhouettes in an antique brass finish with a six-inch orange Ikat shade for an especially warm glow. Because our space is so narrow, I didn’t want the sconces to overwhelm what little wall flanks either side of the bed frame. After securing the metal bases, we inserted the heart of Pooky’s cordless system: the Genesis cell. The battery delivers 15-plus hours of charge and carries a magnetic base, so when you drop it in, it holds firm.
The finest detail of Pooky’s sconces is that we never have to touch them to switch them on—or dim them. A remote handles that. In our case there are two, each fitted with a brass cover so they don’t read as tech-y sitting out on the nightstands.
Pooky’s cordless fixtures certainly cost more than the puck-light hack. Even with a 20-percent discount code, I paid $278 total, shipping included. But the certainty that we can carry these sconces into our next, larger apartment and deploy them anywhere—flanking a bathroom mirror, softening a dim hallway—made abandoning the DIY route worthwhile.
Lydia Geisel has been on the editorial team at Domino since 2017. Today, she writes and edits home and renovation stories, including house tours, before and afters, and DIYs, and leads our design news coverage. She lives in New York City.
Belle is the in-house photographer and associate photo editor for Domino, capturing everything from home tours to gift guides, plus the occasional how-to project. She joined the photo team as an intern in 2018 and was brought on full time in January 2021.
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