When I had to throw a towel over a broken Ikea lamp to block out the light I knew things weren’t quite right. How did I get here? I cover fancy and capable tech for a living, and yet, it took me two years to get rid of a pair of old, broken Ikea lamps in my bedroom. Then I found some floor lamps from Govi that changed everything.
Those Ikea lamps lasted for two years after I moved from Orange County to Los Angeles. Soon after that move, my mother’s Parkinson’s disease — a neurodegenerative condition for which there was no cure — rapidly progressed, my mental health suffered, and much of my own to-do list quietly went on the back burner as her mobility took over and more urgent things took over. So the big, ugly lamps just… stayed. They became part of the background, like everything else I wasn’t caring about.
I also didn’t plug them into the smart plug — another little upgrade I wanted to add in my bedroom, despite being in the entire apartment — which meant I had to get up every time I wanted to turn it on.
One cast a harsh, intensely bright light through the cracked shade. The other was warm – but not hot enough – so I solved that problem on a tired night by simply throwing a towel over it. Yes, there is a risk of fire. Yes, I meant it as a temporary fix for a few days. But the scattered caregiving brain means that temporary fixes can turn into long-term solutions. At some point, it stopped seeming temporary and became my new normal, even though it clearly wasn’t.
Then my brother bought two different Govi Uplighter floor lamps for my mom and me for Christmas, and my Ikea lamp troubles were over. I didn’t expect to have an emotional attachment to Deepak. But I did, and now it’s one of my favorite gadgets.
The Govi was quick and easy to assemble, and was very slim, taking up much less space than the old lamps. As soon as I got rid of the old one and installed the new one, I felt a strange relief and a small sense of control that I hadn’t felt since the move.
Within a week, the old lamp was out of my room. That small change gave me momentum. I started clearing out other corners that had been quietly piled up, things I’d been stepping around for months and didn’t really see anymore.
The bedroom stopped feeling like an unfinished project that I was simply surviving on, and started feeling stable. Calm. Like a place where I can finally exhale. My days are often structured around what my mom needs and what needs to be done next. I don’t really think about my own place at all, except as something else I haven’t found yet. Having a room that felt even just a little bit peaceful made it easier to relax at the end of the day rather than having to maintain that feeling of being “on” all the time at night. It brought me back to myself, even if just a little.
I could relax in a way I hadn’t for a while, without feeling like I needed to get up to do something else. I can dim the lamp from my phone instead of standing up. I could go from cold to hot without needing a towel and risking fire. There’s a ripple effect that slowly travels across the wall and, for reasons I can’t fully explain, it really helps me fall asleep. Cycling through the light colors in the app and syncing it with the ambient music is soothing. Sometimes, the changing colors feel like magic, and I find myself looking at them the same way I would as a child, reminded – briefly – that life can be more fickle than it feels at times. The warm, changing light has a similar effect on my mother, who remains with me, sometimes consoling and even dazzling her as she navigates some of the more difficult parts of the illness, like sunsets, as well as the quiet grief of losing pieces of herself.
And I love that it does all this and more without asking for too much. Setup took about 15 to 20 minutes and didn’t require me to wrap my head around the tools. You control it through the Govi app on your phone, and because it supports Matter, you can also pair it with platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant for voice control. It offers 80 preset scenes and seven music modes as well as a wide range of colors. At $179.99, it’s expensive, but it’s versatile, basically functioning as three lights in one: a top section that casts a soft wave on the ceiling, a colorful middle light, and a regular white light at the bottom.
Truly, it is a wonderful gift and I am very grateful for it. However, I had the same problem: it sometimes forgets to be a lamp. It doesn’t lose Wi-Fi. It does not appear offline in the app. It just turns off randomly. First time this happened, I was watching again stranger things To prepare for the last season. The lights on the screen flickered, and then my room went dark. The atmosphere went from cozy to terrifying in a second, as I briefly wondered if reality and TV had merged (I may have also drank too much wine). Once my brain rebooted, I opened the Govi app and turned it back on. No problem. I assumed it was a power or Wi-Fi issue. Govi sent me a new unit which worked perfectly.
When it works – which is most of the time – it quietly makes my life better. And somehow, that’s enough to make it one of my new favorite gadgets. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped me start taking care of my space — and myself — again.
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