Tips For Great Lighting Design

Design Tips

21 Mar

Used correctly, lighting can be an amazing tool to highlight your favourite interior features and enhance the ambiance of your home.

Lighting design is both an art and a science. Technology is changing all the time, making it easier to create some magical effects. Used correctly, lighting can be an amazing tool to (quite literally) highlight your favourite interior features and enhance the ambiance of your home. Below, we discuss how to optimise some lighting options that you may consider incorporating into your home:

Spotlights

Spotlights work particularly well in recesses, where they can turn dull objects into illuminated sculptures. Carefully choose which item you place under the spotlight. Consider how different shapes and materials will reflect the light and create dramatic shadows. The spotlight in the bathroom of our Claygate project (below) looks fabulous highlighting the recess. Floor spotlights can be particularly useful in loft bathrooms like this with sloped ceilings and limited wall space.

Like spotlights, uplighters are brilliant for making the most of interesting design details in the home, particularly architectural features. Combined with strategically placed downlighters, they can wash beams of light up and down a blank wall, creating drama out of nowhere. These would be perfect for breaking up a long run in a hallway.

Pendants

Pendants can be used to create a fabulous centrepiece. Choose a playful mix of heights over a dining table or of a single swinging orb to make a statement in an empty space. Consider hanging these lights in higher spots of the home, such as stairwells. This will create a cascading effect and fill in the out of reach space with an interesting focal point.

In this case, the pendant our interior designer selected with her client is designed to make a statement from the ground floor to the top of the house, as it flows down the centre of the stairwell. Every single light in this project was carefully chosen and positioned to create a dramatic effect on the ground and first floors.

LED

Use LED strips where you want to add drama or provide more general, ambient light just about anywhere in the home. Tucked in picture rails or as seen here, tucked under shelves and the worksurface of a home bar.

Even if you are not embarking on a major renovation project, there is a lot you can do to change the atmosphere in your room with lighting. For instance, adding a dimmer or changing the size and position of plug-in lamps. There are so many gorgeous lights to choose from. We love the shapes these ceiling hung bedside lamps make in our Wimbledon project. Combine bedside pendants with wall hung reading lights for the best aesthetic and functional solution.