nine glowing hexagons, or the one loud wall in a beige apartment

My apartment is beige and brass and warm light and one candle that got too expensive, and then there is the wall above my desk, which is nine glowing hexagons that can turn a room into a rave. I bought them in october 2021, at launch, the week they came out, because a friend sent me a photo of her brother's setup and I said "oh those are tacky" and then I thought about them for eleven days straight and bought them.

I want to be honest about what that was: not a need. A want with a delivery date.

the honest bit, deposit at risk

I paid $199.99 plus tax for the hexagon smarter kit, nine panels, at launch price, which is the top of the price band for this product and I knew it. Shapes kits have wandered between roughly $120 and $220 depending on shape and sale season ever since, so if you catch one on sale, buy it and think of me. Everything sticks to the wall with tape and plates. I am a renter. My deposit and I have discussed it.

what i actually care about, in order of care

The layout is the product, so plan it before anything touches the wall. Hexagons, triangles, mini triangles, all clipped together with little linkers, and the app has an AR planner that shows your design on your actual wall. I ignored my own advice, mounted two panels, decided the layout was wrong, and started over, which is why two of my hexagons are slightly crooked and will stay that way until I move out. The mounting system is better than the old nanoleafs: adhesive goes on a plate, the panel clips off the plate, so you can swap or replace a panel without peeling tape off drywall. But the plates themselves stay put, so the shape you choose is the shape you chose.

RGBW means the white light is real white. This is the part reviews bury and owners live. There is a true white channel in there, so on weeknights the wall is warm white, dimmed to library levels, and it reads as a lamp, not a nightclub. The panels light edge to edge, which the older triangle kits did not, so there is no dark plastic frame, just light with a thin seam. When I am in beige mode, the wall behaves. When I am not, it does not.

The touch controls are fiddly and every review that says so is correct. Double tap to power off rarely works on the first try. I have stood at my desk politely slapping a hexagon like a person burping a baby, and sometimes it just turns off on the second slap and I feel we have both won something. Swipe gestures depend entirely on your layout, because the gesture has to cross panel borders, and my layout has exactly two good swipe zones. The physical buttons on the controller are the reliable path and I use them more than I admit.

The scenes are the actual magic. Colors flow across the wall in slow gradients, and there are dozens of presets, and I have made my own: a peach to amber sunset for writing, a deep blue for deadline panic, a candle flicker for when the real candle is already burned down. The wall does this thing where the light moves and your brain decides the room is bigger. Four years in, I still catch myself staring at it mid-sentence.

The smart home stuff is the adult part. It lives in apple home and answers to siri, and there is a mode where each panel becomes a homekit button you can program, so one hexagon on the end of my wall turns the whole corner light on. Alexa and google work too. I set one panel to dim everything at midnight, which is a boundary I keep breaking, but it is a nice boundary to have.

The gripes: lumens honesty and the off state. These put out somewhere between 20 and 100 lumens a panel, which is mood lighting, not lighting lighting. It will not light your desk for work, and on gray afternoons it is decoration that happens to glow. And when it is off, the white plastic looks a little like a science fair. My compromise is that it is never off, just dim, which I understand is not a compromise so much as a lifestyle.

the beige wall tangent

Here is the thing about renter walls: they are borrowed. You cannot paint them, you cannot hang heavy things, you cannot leave evidence. The nanoleaf is the one loud decision I have made inside a borrowed space, and it is loud in the specific way that undoes itself: when I move, the plates come down, the spackle goes on, and the wall goes back to the landlord exactly as beige as I found it. My coworker with the cold brew called it "a gamer light" in a meeting once and I said nothing, because she is right, it is a gamer light, and it is also the only object in my apartment that changes when my mood changes, which no lamp, no candle, and no plant has ever managed. The plant part is especially true, since everything I plant dies.

The hexagons do not know they are tacky. That is their superpower.

the soft landing

I keep meaning to add the expansion pack, three more panels, the corner of the wall that is still bare, and every time I get to checkout I remember the crooked two and the tape and my

The truest thing: this is the one wall in my home that matches how the day went, and some nights that is warm white, and some nights it is the color of a sky I am not standing under.

paint with light

ava