Review of the Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp

Philips Hue products have a reputation for being pricier than the competition, but there’s a reason for that: They’re some of the best smart bulbs around, with a full app and a large (and growing) ecosystem of lights to choose from. At $330, the Signe floor lamp is one of Hue’s more unique offerings, and it’s no easy sell on utility alone. But if you’ve got the money and you’re all about Hue, it’s a great addition to your smart home.

Philips Hue White and Color Floor Lamp: Design

The Signe Floor Lamp is a larger version of the Signe Table Lamp. It consists of a thin metal tube with a gradient LED strip along one side and a cylindrical metal base with a power cable protruding from the bottom. The whole thing is about four and a half feet long and there are no physical controls on the device. For such a large lamp, it has a very modern, almost brutalist look—if your decor is more traditional, you might struggle to find a place for it. It’s available in black or white, as well as a kind of oak finish that adds a woody touch to the base of the white model.

Designed to face a wall, LED lights flood the surrounding area with soft, indirect light in whatever color combination you desire. This type of ambient lighting works best in rooms with light walls with neutral colors—you wouldn’t want a sign in a room painted purple. On light gray walls, the light produced by the sign is enough to light up a room small enough to read, and the colors stand out clearly. Set to neutral white, at its peak, this Hue Signe floor lamp can put out 2,550 lumens, or the equivalent of a 150-watt incandescent bulb.

After using the similar but much cheaper Govee Lyra lamp, which comes in parts that you have to assemble yourself, I was pleased to see the Signe arrive in one piece ready to go. This takes the hassle out of assembling the thing and gives a sleeker look without any visible seams—nice touches at this price point. Overall, it feels sturdy and won’t break if you drop it.

On that note, my biggest complaint about the Signe is that its narrow base isn’t as heavy as I’d like it to be, making it a bit difficult to keep it upright on medium or high-pile carpet. It is possible with some convincing, but a wider and heavier base would make it easier.

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp: Application, Ecosystem, and Performance

The Signe floor lamp is controlled using the Philips Hue app. This means that if you already have Hue lights, Signe is very easy to install in your existing rooms and automations. I use mine in the bedroom, where I set it to mimic the sunrise each morning—an increasingly useful feature as sunrise gets closer and closer later in the day. It features a custom sunrise lighting style, which uses shades of blue, orange, and yellow to give the impression of the morning sky at dawn. But with enough tinkering, you can set Sign to light up on any color combination at the time you want.

There are plenty of pre-baked lighting “scenes” to choose from in the Hue app, each of which applies its own unique color gradient to your Signe light strip (as well as any other color-capable Hue lights you might have in the same room). Call me boring, but I don’t use the more vibrant scenes with bold purples, reds, or greens. So most of the time I stick to what’s proven default values A class that sets lights to more standard light colors.

But the color options are fun for events or even just for fun. In addition to the ready-to-use Hue color schemes, you can set triple color schemes of your choice. You also have the option to save your custom settings as new scenes to quickly re-render on demand or add to automation.

Sync the Signe floor lamp to your PC or Mac to match the colors on your screen using the Hue desktop sync app, or sync with your Spotify account for a light show synced to your music. The Signe is also compatible with the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box to match your TV’s content—though if you’re primarily looking for that kind of functionality, something like the Hue Gradient Lightstrip will probably suit you better.

Hue works well with Google Assistant and Alexa, and once you link your Hue account with your voice assistant, you can turn the Signe floor lamp on and off, adjust its brightness and even change its color by voice. Hue lights can also be added to routines in any ecosystem, but you won’t get granular control over Hue’s internal automation. Beyond simply turning the sign in on or off, I found it easier to program what I wanted the bulb to do directly from the Hue app.

This isn’t an indictment of Hue in particular, but I do wish it was less tedious to control smart lights using the Google Home app. You can use the Google app to adjust the Sign’s brightness and color in general, but there’s no option to turn on Hue lighting scenes on demand. And adding smart lights to Assistant routines is a tedious process that requires a lot of steps (and a lot of checkboxes). Maybe it will improve in the next Google Home update.

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp: Should You Buy It?

There’s no getting around it: The Philips Hue Signe floor lamp is very expensive. As cool as it is, you’re paying $330 for the lamp. I’ve owned sofas for less.

But it’s one hell of a great lamp, and its build quality makes it feel less like a technical novelty and more like a sophisticated piece of furniture. Aside from the price and my quibbles with its base (which you only apply if you intend to use it on carpet), I don’t see much I’d change.

Compared to a similar Govee Lyra light I’ve been using for a year, the Signe has better application, a smoother light gradation with no separate LEDs visible, and the benefit of being part of the ever-growing Hue ecosystem. I really like this thing, and if it’s in my price range, I think you will, too.