In theory, bringing fresh light to a home isn’t hard. In practice, though, lighting a home in especially effectively isn’t entirely straightforward.
Through being strategic with how you use domestic lighting, you can help to increase your home’s overall appeal and reduce the number of electric lights you would need to source in the first place — as the following points attest.
Be a pedant with pendants
That’s a reference to pendant lighting, which you could understandably consider installing above a kitchen island. However, if you do go down this route, you should carefully position the light so that it points down onto the surface and consequently acts as a task light.
Tom Bartlett, founder of the interior design studio Waldo Works, tells ELLE Decoration UK: “I tend to avoid multiple pendants (the Starbucks effect); it’s best to spend the money on a single, really good one.”
Be subtle when lighting up a bathroom mirror
Bartlett urges you to “aim for a warm halo effect rather than anything clinical”, adding that his team likes to “use wall lights, shaded or obscured, and a downlight to the basin and the front of the face fitted with a non-glare shield.”
However, he advises against pointing downlights towards the head of the mirror’s user, as doing so could too easily reveal hair dye, roots and baldness.
Arrange post lights symmetrically outdoors
This can look delightfully elegant in both the front and back garden. Ideal Homes shows how one homeowner has hidden the base of a lamp post-style lighting fixture inside a flower-filled pot, leaving the outdoor setting looking akin to a public park.
If the lamp post design isn’t quite your thing, doing a bit of online shopping would enable you to peruse a broad selection of post lights suitable for placing on either side of a patio or front gate.
Place lights at various heights
Doing this can result in a pleasingly textured effect shorn of harshness that could otherwise leave you and other people in the home having to repeatedly wait for their eyes to adjust.
Fortunately, electric lights vary not only in their essential design but also in the kind of height at which they are intended to be fitted. So, you could mix things up relatively easily by investing in the likes of table lamps, floor lighting and ceiling lighting.
Find clever ways to conceal lighting units
You could be pleasantly surprised by what sumptuous results you can achieve just by doing this. For a start, try replicating Bartlett’s trick of placing an LED strip light on the living room’s floor area hidden by the curtain. This can help to make the overall room feel larger than it actually is.
It could also make the light appear as though it is sunlight pouring through the window rather than from an artificial source. Hence, if your home lacks a steady, reliable supply of natural light, opting for this alternative, consequential kind of lighting could appreciably assist you in striking an ambient tone.