Let There Be Light

Some rooms don’t get enough sun. Some rooms have no overhead light. And some rooms, despite myriad light sources, simply lack the verve of a well-lit space. Try these lighting strategies to give your home an even glow.

By Darcel Rockett
CTW Features

Everyone has one – a dark room or area in the house that never feels homey due to improper lighting. From function to design, lighting affects everything from appearance to feel, from highlights to accents: All are important to create a cohesive, warm living space.

“Lighting is the single most important thing in my opinion,” says Kelly Edwards, design coordinator for HGTV’s “Design on a Dime” Chicago team. “It definitely can make or break a great design. It sets the tone for the rest of the room and can change the whole feel of the space.”

To create a lively, inviting environment, the American Lighting Association, Dallas, Texas, suggests focusing attention on lighting in hallways, foyers and stairways to improve the lighting in adjacent spaces. Ceiling fixtures, sconces and track or recessed lights work well to light cavernous hallways.

Flush-mount ceiling fixtures offer widely distributed lighting and indirect brightening. They work well in kitchens and bedrooms, and are good for use in areas where ceilings are lower.

Randall Whitehead, lighting designer and author of “Residential Lighting, a Practical Guide” (Wiley, 2003) says you’ll want to make sure the scale of the fixtures is right for each space where they are used. He offers these tips:

• Keep in mind that no one light source can perform all the functions of lighting (decorative, accent, task and ambient) required for a specific space. “Layering all of these different lights is the key to good lighting design,” San Francisco-based Whitehead says.

• Use chandeliers and table lamps as decoration, since they cannot provide illumination for other functions.

• Track and recessed lights serve as accents, so they should only be used when highlighting objects within a room.

• Task lighting for activities such as reading and kitchen work require more then just an overhead light since the task is located between your head and your work surface, and your head can cast a shadow onto your job.

• Ambient light or general illumination fills a room, and comes from sources that bounce illumination off the ceiling and walls, such as opaque wall sconces, torchieres, indirect pendants and cove lighting. The inclusion of an ambient light source works only if the ceiling is light in color. Simply putting ambient lights on one dimmer and accent lighting on another can provide a whole range of illumination level settings.

“Once you understand the functions of light you can begin to look at lighting in a whole new way. By layering these four functions together you can create environments that welcome visitors while providing usable light for day-to-day activities,” Whitehead says.

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