The Secrets of Effective Home Lighting Design

Do you ever look at the photographs of beautiful homes in lifestyle magazines and wondered how they get to look so stunning? Well wonder no more, the secret is simply good lighting.

Like most of us I expect you’re quite familiar with the sparkly lighting found in up-market stores and though I’m sure you’ve never personally been thrown into a grim prison cell you almost certainly recognise the stereotypical image from countless movies of a single light bulb that’s way too bright. Would you consider using either of these as a design influence for your own home lighting?

Yet amazingly a great many people do indeed gravitate towards such extremes with all too predictable consequences. The fact is that any room that is mainly lit with ambient (usually overhead) light will seem featureless, flat, slightly dingy and completely unappealing. Conversely, if the main lighting consists of in your face accent lighting and showy feature lamps the effect will be overly dramatic – all contrast and arresting shadows but hardly somewhere to spend any amount of time.

The trick to designing successful home lighting is to ensure that you incorporate all four of the fundamental lighting types, which are: accent, decorative, task and ambient. Of course it will be necessary to alter the balance between these various elements in order to suit the required purpose or look, but the central idea remains: the best home lighting is achieved through a blend of these main lighting types and not just using one or perhaps two.

To take an example from music; if a band contains vocals, lead guitar, bass and drums then it’s natural for any one of these to either fade up or down in the mix. But take one out totally or alternatively isolate it and you will immediately be aware that the sound just isn’t right. Balancing lighting is no different.

What then are the four basic types of lighting and how are they best combined to create the best lighting designs?

The first two are all about function, creating usable light.

Ambient light is characterized as appearing to fill a space with diffuse light and is often provided in domestic settings by central ceiling roses and in working environments by fluorescent strip lights. The point of ambient light is to create a foundation of background light on which to mount the other types. In the absence of ambient light other types of lighting paradoxically don’t produce enough luminosity yet also appear too bright (because they contrast too strongly against the background).

Task lighting is for assisting with particular tasks, for example food preparation, school homework, reading a magazine, and so on. It should illuminate only the zone where the task is to be performed and be bright enough to see clearly but not so bright as to cause glare and strain the eyes.

The second two forms of lighting are about style – how things look, creating a mood.

Accent lighting is using light to accentuate particular features and bring out their inherent qualities, whether these might be their shape, texture, color or simply their importance to you. The secret to getting accent lighting right is to ensure that whatever is being lit is clearly the centre of attention while the light source itself is as far as possible nowhere to be seen.

Decorative lighting is similar to accent lighting, the principal difference being that this time it is the light source itself that is the focus of attention. Examples might include LED feature lights or a sculpted floor lamp.

Mixing these main types of lighting typically requires no more than ensuring that related groups are controlled by their own switches. Most obviously, task lighting should be able to be turned on when required and eliminated from the scene when no longer needed.

Possibly the most important of the lighting types to get right is the one that is least noticed – ambient lighting. Varying the levels of ambient light completely alters how the overall effect looks and if you were to adopt only one measure to enhance your home lighting, then controlling your ambient lighting with dimmer switches would be the one to go for.

The use of accent lighting tends inevitably to be driven by the availability and location of features you want to accent, but try not to focus it all in one spot. Finally, decorative lights can be positioned anywhere you like really, but in practice are often used to either fill in gaps in the lighting scheme or to deliberately draw the eye in certain directions.

That then concludes this quick overview of the principles of successful home lighting design, though there is much more once you dig deeper, such as how many modern lighting designs are now based on LED light. This is not simply because the effects made possible with LED are quite stunning or because LED lights are way out in front in terms of efficiency (and therefore also cost). The plain fact is that LED lighting is the future of home lighting and will in a few years have become totally dominant.