A guide to the best LED lightbulbs that actually look incandescent

There’s no faster way to ruin a good room than with bad lighting. Now that we’re in a decidedly post-incandescent world (although you can still find them online and in limited quantities at some big-box stores), we’re faced all too often with LED bulbs that betray our interiors by casting a deeply unappealing and harshly cold light.

Sure, there are some clear advantages of LED bulbs, namely they last for years (in many cases, over 10), don’t emit any heat, and the amount of energy they use is so nominal that it makes no difference whether you leave them on 24/7 or turn them off every time you leave the room.

The key to finding a good LED bulb is twofold: First, pay attention to the temperature rating on the Kelvin scale. You want something around 2700—”soft white.”

Second, and most importantly, you need to choose brands wisely. After a lot of trial and error, my partner John and I have settled on two favorites that we use consistently—and which the writer Lila Allen, who pens Wrong House, a wonderful design Substack you should all subscribe to, asked about on her Instagram last week! Knowing I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to these sorts of things, she tagged me in one of the comments, and I’m here to share my lightbulb gospel.

If you’re looking to make a large-scale change to LED around the house and need to replace standard bulbs, look no further than GE Relax. They are affordable ($15 for a pack of 4) so you can buy them in bulk, and most importantly, the light they throw is nearly indistinguishable from incandescent. We’ve tried Philips Hue (which many swear by) but found GE Relax to be slightly warmer and thus preferable.

This is our go-to for shaded table lamps, pendant lights, semi-flushmounts, sconces, or any other typical light fixture where the bulb isn’t visible and you just need something that’s solid and dependable. If given the option, I would opt for a frosted bulb (as opposed to clear) to better diffuse the light. They’re fully dimmable, and they come in candelabra sizes if you need to outfit a chandelier. We just swapped out incandescents for these in a bathroom sconce and nobody would know unless they read this newsletter.

The main downside is that sometimes tricky to locate GE Relax bulbs if you don’t want to order them online. I’ve had the best luck either at Lowe’s or Target.

A few years ago, I put out a call on Instagram asking for LED recommendations, and a number of fancy interior designers had a common favorite: UK-based Tala.

Tala offers high-quality, stylish bulbs of different shapes and sizes, but what you want to look for is the dim-to-warm line, which starts out quite bright and cool at full brightness but dims to a lovely golden hue that is some of the best LED light you can find anywhere.

They are admittedly a splurge—a standard bulb is around $20. That said, Tala bulbs are perfect if you have a fixture with an exposed bulb in a room where you’re trying to set a specific mood or vibe. When we moved back into the Geneva house after the flood, we needed a temporary light fixture for the entryway and paired an oversized Tala bulb ($34) with a $13 flushmount fixture from Lowe’s, and the combination looked so elevated because of the stylish bulb and its soft glow.

Here’s when to not use Tala: If you need bright task lighting, like in a kitchen. That’s when you go for the GE Relax. The magic of Tala is when you have a small table lamp or chandelier that will almost always be dimmed. Then go for Tala. Otherwise, pivot back to GE.

I have clients who recently purchased an apartment in Brooklyn that has a 2010s light fixture with exposed Edison bulbs, which are admittedly not my client’s style. They decided to swap all the bulbs with Tala on my recommendation, and they messaged me saying how much they love the look. That’s the perfect application of Tala IMO.

This February, we rented an 18th-century stone house in Stone Ridge, NY with friends for the weekend. The library was partially illuminated by sconces that looked like candles but were really outfitted with small LED bulbs engineered to look like flames from the Electric Candle Company.

They were crazy good. But of course they were—Electric Candle Company supplies the bulbs for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period room chandeliers!

The reason why these bulbs are so successfully deceitful is because they emit just as much light as a single flame (it literally is just 1 Watt), so to say this is a form of accent lighting is quite an understatement. You would need scores of these to fully illuminate a room, and at $36 each, they do not come cheap. That said, when we had both real candles going and electric candles turned on, if you weren’t paying too much attention, the similarity is absolutely remarkable.

Turns out LED lights don’t have to be so bad—you just need to know where to look.