I absolutely Love this lamp, it goes perfectly with my furniture as you can see, with that being said, I was under the impression that the base lite worked independent of the top lights, they do not. When you turn on the lamp all 3 lights come on, you can turn the upper lamp lights off with the pull chains which leaves the base lite on, but there is no way to turn the base lite off and just use the upper lamp lights to read or whatever.when you turn the base lite off with the inline rotary switch it cuts the power to the entire lamp. I had put 3 lamps of this style in my favorites and wonder if they all work like this.I'm very disappointed by this but like I said I do love the lamp and will keep it because customer service really couldn't tell me if they all worked this way or not. So rather keep it than return and exchange it just to find out the next one works the same way.