WHO NEEDS AN OUTLET?
These designer lamps are built to go anywhere, and to move from space to space on board.
Tr u t h b e t o l d , Mark Robinson got the idea in his living room. It was a big room with furniture in the middle, but outlets in the walls. He didn’t want to trip over lamp cords. ¶ He looked and looked but couldn’t find a cordless lamp that was anything beyond a novelty design. A year and about $1.5 million in seed money later, the company Alexander Joseph came online this past September, offering luxury cordless lamps — all built in a way that Robinson knows, from his years of racing and cruising, will work aboard yachts. ¶ “Our lamps are incredibly heavy,” he says. “The reason for that, and the low center of gravity, is to prevent them from falling over on boats.” ¶ The lamps can be bolted through furniture for extra stabilization, or they can be snapped into place with clips on the nonslip rubber base. ¶ “You can pick up the lamps and move them that way,” he says of the clips. “Imagine you’re sitting on a motorboat, you can move the lamp from inside to the aft deck for an alfresco meal.” ¶ The lamps work without a cord because of high-density lithium-ion batter-
ies in each model’s base. Beneath each lampshade is an LED bulb, but without the chip that’s usually inside it. ¶ “We took it out of the bulb and put it into the base of the lamp, where we can control how many amps the bulb needs,” he says. “By putting that driver into our electronic circuitry, it allows us to reduce the amount of amps that it needs to operate effectively, and that, in turn, means that we reduce the power consumption. That’s important because the less power it takes, the longer your batteries will last. Novelty lights on the market, they last about six hours before you have to recharge them. With our lamp, they last three to four weeks with normal use.” ¶ Prices start around $1,600 and climb to about $28,000 for the limited-edition Blaze model made with 24-karat gold. The company built the Blaze demo to give yachtsmen ideas of custom possibilities. ¶ “We think it’s the largest-ever hand-blown piece of glass made in the U.K.,” he says. “That took us five months. It took us 22 attempts to make the glass body. We have a can-do attitude. We’ll find a way to make things happen.”