Shed Office Update
Nanoleaf Skylight First Impressions
It's been a busy couple of weeks as I've continued to work on my new indoor/outdoor shed office/studio workspace.
We've made a lot of progress. The roof and trim are finished. It should be able to survive another one of these wet winters that we're starting to anticipate now in Northern California.
The floors have also been finished with some fine light-colored hickory wood. Evidently it's much more difficult to find decent wood flooring than it used to be. Vinyl planks seem to be the default option for most flooring projects these days, but I went with a more classic look.
And maybe most important to this post is that I've installed some new fun lighting in the space! Specifically, I purchased the Nanoleaf Skylight kit. If you're not familiar with Nanoleaf, they've been making funky smart lights in a variety of shapes and colors for quite sometime. These skylights may be their most ambitious offering to date as they allow you to piece together square light panels in a variety of shapes. You just need to affix one panel to the main power source in the ceiling and then you can chain together as many additional panels as you'd like.
I opted to go for the 3-panel starter kit plus one additional panel. Yes, that's four panels total for all of you mathematicians out there. The other cool thing is that you can arrange these panels in different ways. I could have gone for a straight line of light. I could have just evenly spaced them into a big square. But I decided that the best setup for my space would be two vertical squares with two horizontal squares on either side. I guess it's somewhat of a diamond shape.
Most of the time, I much prefer to work in natural light. With a row of real windows just below the roofline, my office feels airy and bright in almost all weather. So I didn't need a very bright artificial looking light overhead. I basically wanted to mimic another window on the ceiling. And the Nanoleaf Skylight really does that but also allows for lots of fun colors and customizations.
I'm not sure how often I'll want colored lights above my head, but it's nice to have the option. I wouldn't want to impose my colored lights onto others while on video calls, but I have seen it done before. It just brings another layer of fun design to an otherwise white, minimal room.
Like any good smart light, the Nanoleaf Skylight can be controlled via an app or voice commands. The app works well enough and offers up tons of pre-configured lighting scenes while allowing you to create your own. I was actually pleasantly surprised with the AI scene generator. It lets you enter some key words and then it spits out a lighting option that fits. My input of "overcast fog" generated a perfectly gray/blue color that replicated the exact color that matched the Bay Area fog outside. Not too shabby!
Obviously a light like this really shines when it's actually dark out. That may have been an extremely obvious sentence but you know what I mean. The colored lights act as decor during the day, but at night, they actually illuminate the room and completely change the vibe. I try to limit my late night work sessions, but having fun colored lights above can really be motivating or calm you down before bed.
And did I mention that you can easily sync the lights to change with music? Yeah, everything is highly customizable and can fit into your smart home ecosystem nicely. I'll certainly be playing around with things a bit more now that I have them installed. And these light combinations will be amazing around Halloween and Christmas, I will certainly have a lot of fun.
No, Nanoleaf is not paying for this review, but I'd highly recommend the Skylights anyway. They may not make sense for every room in your house (I've gone with Philips Hue for that!) but they're a really great way to add some personality to a specific area of your home. I think a home office can be the perfect example of this. As I start ramping up my interior decorating game over the coming months, I think these lights will fit in really well. I'll certainly have more to share in future posts, but for now I am really digging my new lights and new floors.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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