Back when I lived in New York, I went to the opening of a new pizza restaurant in the East Village. The food was excellent but it’s the lighting that I remember most – far more than the fluffiness of the dough, in fact. The long, thin space was spot-lit in a stark white light that was the polar opposite of cosy. With just a small turn of the dimmer switch, the restaurant would have been transformed. But alas, no.
To be fair, New York normally has a decent lighting game. Or it certainly knows how to do what one might call “intimate”. My local Brooklyn bar is so dark that the only way to read the menu is with a smartphone light (under the table, of course, so as not to disturb the ambience). So which nation gets it just right when it comes to lighting? Which one knows how to not overdo the wattage during this festive season but also not plunge a place into eye-straining murkiness? Well, we’re not giving away any prizes if your first reaction was to head for the Nordics.
Scandinavia’s inherent good-lighting taste was reinforced to me during a recent trip to Copenhagen and Malmö. Getting a taxi from the latter’s train station to a friend’s house, I stared out of the window as the impeccably kept residences slid past and made sure I had a good ogle – not that the open curtains were doing anything else but inviting my voyeuristic stare. Alongside the fact that everyone seemed to have a designer and mid-century pendant lights were often alongside the requisite Christmas stars in the windows, I was simply struck by the level of the lighting. It was like the whole world had been tuned to the perfect frequency to make everything look that bit nicer.
The truth is that you don’t need expensive lighting to be able to do all of this. And actually, given the cost-of-living crunch that we’re currently experiencing, you might end up saving money by turning the dial down. As I continued to look out of the taxi window in residential Malmö, I could swear that even the streetlights’ wattage was just so. Or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me?
Ed Stocker is Monocle’s Europe editor at large, based in Milan.
