Lighting is a critical and yet sometimes overlooked element of a room’s design. The right choices can make a space more comfortable to inhabit and tasks easier to accomplish. Bad or inadequate lighting can make a room grim and uninviting. And even though it’s especially key in workspaces where we spend many hours of our day, lighting can still end up being an afterthought in our home offices, even two years into the new normal of work-from-home life. What’s more, that bare-bones clamp lamp I picked up at the hardware store or the random desk model you grabbed at an office supply store may even be detracting from our work. Research suggests poor lighting (including office lighting) can fatigue our eyes, dull our alertness and even negatively impact our mood. 

But just because office lights affect our wellbeing doesn’t mean they need to look clinical. The best desk lamps give off good light and also look artful on a work surface. To help you make a smart desk-lamp decision, we consulted lighting and design pros and scoured the market for options that meet their top criteria. These are the best desk lamps for an elevated, well-lit workspace.

If you’d like to read how we vetted and tested these desk lamps and which experts we consulted, scroll down for more detail.

Humanscale’s Nova Task Light offers high-end design and superior light quality and functionality. It is also easy and intuitive to operate.

The Nova Task Light was the highest-quality lamp we tested. The light feels soft and warm, not antiseptic, and the lamp is fully dimmable using an almost invisible touch sensor on the arm. The motion sensor is effective—it shut off after 15 minutes of no detected activity. We like the integrated LED design, which gives off a consistent wash of light. The head pivots 360 degrees, and elbow and base joints on the arm mean you can adjust it however you need. Aesthetically, the matte finish is appealing and gives the lamp a more high-end feel than some of its competitors. The base feels sufficiently heavy to prevent the lamp from tipping over. 

The Tolomeo Lamp has a sleek silhouette and high-quality light output. It’s dimmable and adjustable, though those functions don’t operate as smoothly as on some other task lights.

Artemide’s Tolomeo lamp, recommended by a few of our experts, is beautifully designed and relatively smooth to operate, though not as effortlessly adjustable as the Nova lamp. (The head pivots along an up-and-down axis and rotating the shade requires two hands.) We appreciate the customization options—you can choose from dozens of bases and shades. I would suggest the Micro size for home use; the Mini that I tested felt too big on an average-size desk. 

Measuring just 6 inches wide and 16.5 inches high, the Pixo Plus lamp is a clean-looking choice, particularly for a space-challenged home office, offering adequate light.

The Pixo Plus lamp won the Red Dot design award, an annual international design competition, when it debuted 10 years ago, and it’s still a sleek and relatively affordable option, especially for a WFH space that’s on the small side. While it does not have a multipoint adjustable arm like our top pick does, I found I could still adjust it to most of my needs via the 360-degree swiveling head and easy-gliding joint at the base. We found the dimming function easy to use with one hand.

The Humanscale Element Vision lamp offered many of the same features as the Nova at a slightly lower price point. However, I found the silver-tone design less attractive and the joints somewhat cheap-looking.

The Flos Kelvin Edge lamp was suggested by some of our experts, and the company is known for its high-end style. I found the lamp easy to use (the tap to dim feature is super-responsive) and pleasingly designed (although a little on the large size for my desk). Ultimately we eliminated this model because it did not perform significantly better than the competition given its high price. If budget and size are less of a concern, this is an excellent alternative to the Nova lamp. 

The Shades of Light Copernicus lamp, recommended by one of the interior designers we spoke with, is artfully designed, but it offered less functionality than the other lamps we tested—most notably a limited range of adjustments and no dimming. 

Anglepoise’s classic task lamps came up often in my initial research. Architects and designers frequently cited the brand as one of their go-tos. I tested the Type 75, one of the brand’s more popular designs. It was one of the only lamps I tested without an integrated LED, and I sorely missed the power to dim; the on/off switch felt clunky after operating the high-tech LED lamps. The iconic spring arm design is excellent, but the head’s swivel was not as smooth as competitors’. I did appreciate its all-metal design and dozen color options.

I’ve written about design, and in several instances lighting, for more than 20 years, and to pinpoint the best desk lamps you can buy right now, I read up on current lighting technologies and took a deep dive into online reviews of desk lamps to get up to speed on today’s market. Then I contacted four lighting pros—two workplace designers and two interior designers with a knack for office design—to find out more. 

First, I interviewed Brad Johnson, a workplace design consultant and founder of Bradley Johnson Design based in London. With more than 25 years of experience in the workplace design realm, he offered details on the essential features of a good desk lamp. Next, I reached out to Dani Gelfand, the design director at Studio O+A, a San Francisco-based firm known for its workplace designs. Both Johnson and Gelfand have consulted on the design of dozens of professional offices, but I also wanted a home-office perspective, so I spoke to two residential interior designers: Laura Hodges, a Baltimore-based interior designer who recently styled a show-house home office for House Beautiful magazine that appeared on its cover; and interior designer Stevie McFadden, the founder of Flourish Spaces in Richmond, Va., who has a background in human resources and organizational behavior. 

I asked our experts to share lamp manufacturers and models they have used and liked in the past, and I also conducted my own research of popular models. To narrow down these picks, I looked at both the specs of the light produced and the physical properties of the lamps themselves. 

All the experts agree that LEDs, and ideally integrated LEDs, are the way to go in 2022. LEDs are incredibly energy efficient, offer high-quality light and don’t need replacement for years. (Integrated LEDs last about 50,000 hours.) The measurements our experts said were important include the color rendering index (CRI) and color temperatures. CRI was a new term to me: It’s the measurement of how a light source represents color compared to daylight. A CRI of 80 or higher is desirable. I also paid attention to the color temperature, which is measured in kelvins (K). LEDs often get a bad reputation for rendering blue light, but experts say that if the temperature is in the range of 2,500 K to 3,000 K it should provide appealing light for a home setting. Based on this, I narrowed my focus to lamps with a CRI of more than 80 and a temperature of 3,000 K or less. Dimming was another feature our pros prioritized, with three or more settings as the gold standard.

It’s worth noting that I did not worry about the exact number of lumens because all the lamps offered sufficient illumination, and since I gave preference to dimmable lamps, a slightly too-bright lamp could be adjusted down. Likewise, I did not rank lamps based on the wattage used, since the LED lamps were all relatively low in their energy usage, and the difference between them was negligible when considering overall household energy use.

In terms of design and construction, our experts recommended lamps that could be easily angled and adjusted to meet the user’s various needs throughout the day. Lamps that had both a moveable head and moveable arm took precedence over others with only one adjustment point; a third point of adjustment, like a moveable joint where the arm meets the base or a full-swivel head, was a nice-to-have but not essential attribute. Size-wise, my initial instinct was that a longer reach to the lamp would be preferable, but when lamps arrived to test, I realized that you can have too much of a good thing—a particularly long-armed lamp can be hard to position on the small-ish desks that are often found in a home office setting.

I assembled each lamp myself, noting how easy (or not) it was to put together. I first attempted to operate each lamp without reading the manual to determine how intuitive the operation would be—and for some, I did have to consult that manual in the end. I used each lamp in my everyday desk setup, with both papers and a laptop and during daytime and evening hours. I also placed a red apple on white paper to compare the quality of the light. While using each lamp, I assessed the following:

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