Where to shop for... lighting in Singapore

Trying to purchase lighting is a rather tiring endeavour as you are looking at buying 20-30 items at one go! And there's a whole different variety of styles and prices out that as well as those out to "chop your carrot".

Before  we went shopping, our ID gave us a specific list of lights that we needed for our house.

It went something like this below. I even asked her to give me a prices estimate. 

In the end, we only went to 4 places to look at lighting. Two were based on online recommendation, one from my ID and one is IKEA.

Our strategy was to go into a shop and asked to be quoted for all the items our ID stated. This gave us a rough estimate of the price range of the shop, as well as whether that shop had what we wanted.

The one from our ID (Azora) gave us the highest quote out of the lot and a lot of the designs weren't very exciting as the place was quite small. It was close to 4k for all the items.

The cheapest (aside from IKEA) was lighting.com.sg (LCS) which sells Philips lights. The designs were very functional but didn't really have that extra oomph factor that we wanted. I think it was under 2k. Staff @ lavender was knowledgeable and were able to give good advice. The thing I like about it is that there is a price guarantee. There's not need for haggling cos the price is fixed and guaranteed to be the lowest in Singapore. So that saves me the trouble of haggling and worrying that I got "chopped".

The middle pricing was from Chan Huat (CH) @ Balestier. They have 3 shops in Balestier. Make sure you go to the biggest one for best range.  I spoke to 3 staff, one local and 2 foreigners. All were pretty knowledgeable and friendly. They patiently accompanied me and my hubby as we scoured the entire place for lights that fitted our design. Kudos to good staff training in both CH and LCS. I felt that Chan huat had more "designer" lights while lightings.com.sg was more functional type. That is also reflected in the price of under 2.5k. You are expected to bargain here though to get discount of about 10%. They don't give deep disounts as their price is ok competitively and they seem to have brisk business, so it's not like they die die must close your deal.

In the end, we decided to mix and match as we really didn't want to bust our budget. It's really easy to get into this mode of "I HAVE TO GET THESE LIGHTS... cos you just love how they look" and end up buying expensive lights and busting your budget. It starts off fairly simple, you find one nice light that costs $300, then to match that look, you find another light that costs $500, and then guess what? You find another light going for $400 that completes the whole look. Before you know it, its $1k for just 3 lights! At this point, you should take a deep breath, walk away and discuss rationally with your partner over coffee.

That's what I did. Or more like, I got dragged away by my hubby for some pretty intense discussion! And guess what, when I stepped out of the shop, and mulled over for a few nights, the lights din seem that attractive after all! It's all in the mind!

Repeat my mantra: Keep to the budget!

This has helped kept our budget relatively on target.

So we picked out one key light which we were willing to splurge on - in this case it's this kerosene lamp from CH for our dining table

 

For the not so important areas, such as service yard, bomb shelter, common toilet, passageway, we went with Ikea. For the rest with went with LCS.

I have to say though, its really not easy to find lighting that suits out country theme as it really doesn't seem to be in vogue at all. Wooden lamp are really hard to find.

We went with this for our bedrooms and living room from LCS as it's got a wooden frame. This wooden frame has 2 "looks" as you can flip it around for a light brown wood border.

For downlights, we went for philips energy saving ones as they would cost less. Our rationale is that we would slowly swap the energy saving light bulbs for LED ones when they blow, so that we don't feel the pinch. :p

And one more thing, LCS has a 7 day guarantee whereby if your lights spoil or contractor spoil them during installation, you can bring them back for exchange. Lucky got such thing. Cos that was what happened to us - The white cover of our bedroom light was made of pretty soft plastic and was dented during installation. But we managed to return the cover to LCS and they replaced a new one for us, no questions asked. How good is that? :)

Hope this entry can help other people who are going through the same thing as me and can save you some trouble!