This article is part of our latest special report on Design, which is about getting personal with customization.
My light-switch plates, which had long been banal, now make me feel empowered.
In the last few weeks, I have commissioned half a dozen of them in custom shapes, colors and patterns. It turns out that nearly boundless creativity can be sparked by simple flat rectangles with perforations for toggles and screws.
Four of my dream plates cost from $8 to $30 apiece — I bought them without admitting that I was on a journalistic mission. Etsy’s California Printables and Zazzle’s red_dress covered my plates with images of a pastel scene of a French chateau moat by the 19th-century artist Mary Rogers Williams, the subject of a biography I recently published. (California Printables even tinted the screws to match the painter’s dusty rose palette.) I commissioned a resin plate from Etsy’s PourlyMadeByMina, in iridescent blueish swirls reminiscent of my collection of Art Nouveau ceramics. And a 3-D plate from Additive Innovation 3D has been emblazoned with the French words “ici” and “maintenant” (“here” and “now”), which had been engraved on a silver ring that my college-age daughter loved and lost (it disappeared in the high school gym).
I veered into high-end strata as well, working with elite designers aware that their plate prototypes would appear in a newspaper. Scott Behr of Total Metal Resource created a layered steel portrait of my black cat, Cleopatra, her fangs bared and ears on alert. He was riffing on ads for Black Cat Fireworks, which he had played with as a child. He spent days tinkering with the outlines and mechanics for me, so that movable elements on the cat’s face push the toggle up and down. As the feline’s steel parts descend to illuminate a room, Mr. Behr said, “It’s badass.”
Joe Doucet of Joe Doucet x Partners abstracted Cleopatra’s inky fur spikes into saw-toothed ridges covering the lower half of a 3-D-printed light-switch plate. “I wanted the plate itself to reflect the contrast between light and dark,” Mr. Doucet said. The raised edges create intriguing shadows and can be easily found by anyone fumbling in the dark.
I also explored, but did not order from, the luxurious world of Forbes & Lomax, which customizes plates for up to hundreds of dollars apiece. With no screws in sight, the products seem to float. They come in clear acrylic as well as metals in matte, glossy, patinated or painted finishes, with custom engraved texts and images. Dominick DiRenzo, the manager of the company’s New York showroom, told me that among the more unusual recent orders was a switch labeled “unspooky,” which would flip on all the lights around a wealthy family’s estate in case any occupant felt unsafe.
Letting there be light didn’t used to allow for self-expression. Starting in the late 19th century, when electricity was first brought indoors, control buttons and toggles were mounted on knobs or set into minimally ornamented sheets of metal, glass and plastics including Bakelite.
Walls were often papered right over the plates, and needlepoint kits were available for creating little stitched cover-ups. By the 1970s, manufacturers realized that some consumers wanted to experiment with the light control devices that they handled every day. Plates for sale in hardware stores came molded with cartoon characters, angels, ballet slippers, kitchen implements and sports team logos.
The options have exploded during the last decade. Custom or stock plates have become widely available in jade, ceramic, mosaic, Swarovski crystals, barn siding and recycled food tins. Screw holes and toggles have been incorporated into the designs in witty ways, so that the indentations and protrusions are used to represent human and animal body parts such as eyes, nostrils, horns, tongues and penises.
I have not yet installed my own relatively demure commissions — in truth, my circuits are a little blown by too many choices. I have walked around my apartment pondering whether Mr. Doucet’s crisp ridges or PourlyMadeByMina’s shimmery resin would be best suited to the kitchen, or whether that would be a waste of pizazz. Will Total Metal Resource’s steel cat amuse or unnerve people as they venture into my foyer after dark? I keep noticing that my existing cream-colored plates not only look boring, but also have developed cracks and chips during decades of daily toggling. I get charged up just thinking about which ones to toss out, as I break with habit and take control.
