flos. night. owl.

The Flos Night Owl carpet/nightlight might be a brilliant idea or just sort of, um, silly. It's a carpet with a pattern on it -- in that pattern is a circle -- on that circle you put an LED light -- at night that light lights up the carpet -- it also lights up the pattern -- and that prevents you from tripping when you go get a glass of water. So the theory goes.

i. liked. it. better.
I liked this better when I thought the light was built into the carpet and better still when I thought the light magically turned on at night. Now that I realize you just place the light on the carpet after you manually switch it on, it's not as cool. That doesn't mean it isn't cool at all, just that it's not as cool as I first thought.

tripping.
The very uncool thing about the carpet is that the light works great to prevent tripping, unless you actually trip over the light itself. Since the light just sits on the carpet, that makes it very trippable in my book. Maybe you light sleepers out there would see the light and avoid it, but like a moth to the flame I'm pretty sure my sleepy self would vector right in on the light and trip over it, or at the very least kick it under the bed.

neat. light.
Aside from those drawbacks, the light itself is kinda cool. It's got six LEDs in it, comes in amber and blue (as does the rug), and is rechargeable. So in the end I think I like the idea of the nightlight carpet, but not this particular execution of the idea. Which runs $595 by the way, and is part of the Baby Zoo collection.