the govee lyra lives in the corner that killed three plants

The corner by my living room window has killed three plants and one reading chair, and it is not the corner's fault, it is mine. First a monstera, then a pothos, then a succulent I was told could not die, all of them gone in under a year. The chair went to a friend who promised to water it. That corner sat empty for a season like a hole in a smile, and then a four foot aluminum pole with a light inside it moved in, and the corner has been employed ever since.

The lamp is the only living-adjacent thing in that corner I have kept alive for four years.

the honest bit, plant funerals included

I paid $139.99 plus tax for the lyra in january 2022, in the white finish, from the govee website during one of their sales. It list-prices around $150 and it goes on sale so often that paying full price is almost a choice, so do better than me. Assembly took two minutes: three segments, one base, one plug, a remote in a bag.

what i actually care about, in order of care

It is an RGB strip on an aluminum pole and the corner placement is the design. You point it at the wall, not the room, and the light bounces and fills, so what you get is not a lamp glowing in your face but a wall that appears to be lit from inside. My walls are a warm cream, which is the best case scenario, because darker walls eat the bounce. On a saturday evening that corner looks like a set piece and the rest of my apartment looks like an apartment.

The gradient is the reason it does not read as a cheap strip. The pole has eight segments that can each hold their own color, so it does sunset gradients, warm to candle to dusk, instead of one flat color like a strip light under a TV. There is a DIY mode where you paint each segment yourself, and I made a peach to amber one on a tuesday that I have not improved on since. The presets have names like gorgeous and science fiction, and half the fun is pressing them to find out what they mean.

Warm white, indirect, bright enough to actually read by. This is the part nobody expects from a color lamp: it puts out real light, around 1500 lumens, and on warm white it becomes the room's main lamp. I have read whole chapters on the couch with nothing else on. It replaced a brass floor lamp with a shade that had been giving its all, and the lamp did not just match the brass lamp's job, it retired it.

The music sync is a lava lamp, and mostly it is off. There is a microphone on the power cable and the lamp will pulse to whatever is playing, and when it catches the beat it is very fun. When it misses, it is still fun, just wrong, like watching someone dance to a different song. I keep it for nights when friends come over and we pretend my living room is a bar. Ninety five percent of the time it is on the plain warm setting, which is the honest usage rate nobody puts in an ad.

The app is the weak joint and the remote is the hero. The govee home app does everything, which is the problem, sixty four plus scenes, submenus, a DIY studio, and a learning curve I would describe as a puzzle. Meanwhile there is a little old-fashioned remote that turns it on, off, bright, and warm, and that flat little rectangle does ninety percent of my interacting. It also lives in the couch. We are all aware.

The wake-up function is the sleeper feature. You can set a gradual brighten in the morning, faint glow to full, over the minutes before your alarm. My phone alarm is a tiny emergency. The lamp sunrise is so gentle that I have woken up before it finished, which has never once happened with the phone. I am not saying it fixed my mornings. I am saying sunday mornings have a color now.

the corner, a short biography 🪴

Every room has one corner that resists all furniture math. Too close to the radiator, too far from the outlet, a weird half shadow in the afternoon. I spent actual money on that corner: a plant stand, a ladder shelf, the chair. The lyra was the first thing that did not need the corner to be anything. It just stands there, thin as a broom, and turns the corner into light. My mom visited in march, looked at it, and said "that's nice, what is it," which is the highest compliment her generation gives.

Lighting is the cheapest interior design degree in the world. I have a real one, and I am telling you the lamp is competing fine.

the soft landing

I keep meaning to build a proper DIY scene, the slow one, the sunset that takes an hour, and every time I open the DIY studio I get lost in the segment editor doing

The truest thing: the corner killed three plants and one chair and finally made peace with a lamp, and every evening when it warms up, the apartment exhales.

give your corner a job

ava