It’s easy to treat your home’s lighting as an afterthought, but you could be pleasantly surprised by how much you feel the difference when you are more careful with your choices of lighting fixtures.
Of course, there are various lighting fixtures to choose from, but they don’t just differ in their design. They also differ in the forms of lighting they are intended to produce, meaning that you can cover all of your bases by investing in a wide range of lighting.
How many different light sources will you need?
It’s not exactly a scientific judgment, but there remain a few rules of thumb worth heeding here. For example, Homebuilding & Renovating advises that, after calculating the size of the space in square meters, you “allow roughly 25 watts per meter (250 lumens)”.
The site also recommends “four light sources per room at the minimum”. Interior designer Abigail Ahern has even told Homes & Gardens that each room should have eight different light sources.
What do you want to achieve with your lighting?
Obviously, different rooms tend to be used for different purposes. Hence, you need to keep these in mind when selecting lighting fixtures for a given room.
Figuring out how a space will be used can be trickier than you might have expected. For instance, an awful lot of what typically happens in a kitchen could be food-related — but, during the pandemic, this room has served as your work-from-home space, too.
You should also consider what times of day a room tends to be used — as, in many instances, natural lighting could take up a lot of the slack. Also Read – Need To Replace Your Windows? Here’s 6 Things To Consider
Create some ambiance with… ambient lighting
Otherwise known as general or background lighting, ambient lighting serves a simple purpose: that giving a room overall illumination.
Examples of ambient lighting, therefore, include ceiling light fittings, spotlights, and fixed wall lights. Ambient lights also include pendants, which can additionally serve as task lighting…
Keep your everyday activities in mind when choosing task lighting
Task lighting is so-called as it is more targeted than ambient lighting. This is because task lighting is meant to provide extra illumination for specific tasks that would require it — like reading, cooking, and, to cite a very 2020s home-based activity, working.
Pagazzi lighting solutions include pendant lights that can work especially well in the kitchen, but interior design guru Tom Bartlett tells ELLE Decoration: “I tend to avoid multiple pendants (the Starbucks effect); it’s best to spend the money on a single, really good one.”
Improve your mood with… mood lighting
If there are objects or architectural features — think along the lines of artwork, cabinets, or sculptures — you would like to particularly highlight in your home, mood lighting can help you to do it. This kind of lighting is alternatively referred to as accent lighting.
If the things you want to highlight are elements of period decor, having some low-level chandeliers fitted near them could be an especially classy method of drawing more attention to these parts of the home.