The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

The intersection of the smart home and decorative lighting often feels like Las Vegas to me: gaudy, excessive, and a place I don’t especially want to take my money. I’m talking specifically about the impractical stuff like vibrant geometric panels or modular light bars that beam forth with oversaturated, unnatural color. The loud kind of lighting that feels like it’s mainly meant to live in the background of a thousand YouTube videos as an attention-grabbing substitute for interesting taste. A purely decorative smart light doesn’t have to be a glaring statement piece, though. Sometimes, it can be a gently colorful, 12-inch-wide, pillowy glass donut. That’s exactly what you get with Ikea’s new Varmblixt smart lamp. You also get a lamp that works well either on a table or mounted to the wall. And whatever smart home ecosystem you use, the Varmblixt is compatible with it, thanks to Ikea’s “Matter over Thread” implementation (so long as you have a Thread border router, like a recent Apple HomePod or Amazon Echo speaker). Yet if you don’t care about that sort of thing, it works just fine with the small, two-button remote that it ships with. I find it hard to justify spending money on pu