by Carlotta Duchamp
Have you ever wondered how it is that some people’s homes look like they stepped off the pages of a glossy “lifestyle” magazine? Well the secret is often to be found in how they use lighting.
You’re familiar no doubt, from spy movies and the like, with that image straight from central casting of a dingy prison cell starkly lit by a bare, overly bright light bulb. And you’re almost certainly equally conditioned to the glitzy lighting so prevalent in smart stores. And would you want to use either of these as a model for how to light your own home?
But the extraordinary thing is that a surprisingly large number of people actually do veer towards one or the other of these polar opposites creating an outcome that is as predictable as it is hideous. Rooms where the lighting is principally provided by overhead ambient light invariably acquire a flat, drab and featureless quality that almost saps the soul. Rooms full of strong accent lighting and eye-catching feature lamps might look impressive with their barrage of dramatic shadows and powerful contrasts but are almost certain to cause eye-strain and give you a headache in short order.
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.
Consider an example using music, where a band consists of lead guitar, vocals, drum and bass. It’s perfectly normal for any one element to be noticeably louder or quieter than the others, but if one drops out totally or instead drowns out the others then it is instantly apparent that the sound is simply not quite right, and this exact same principal applies to lighting.
What then are the four basic types of lighting and how are they best combined to create the best lighting designs?
These first two are concerned with function, in other words usable light.
Ambient light is generalised, all round, diffuse, non-specific. Typically pendants hung from ceiling roses or in the workplace central fluorescent strip lights. Its purpose is to provide a base level of background illumination which the other types may thus enhance. Without ambient light your other lighting would a) stand out too much (too much contrast) and b) struggle to actually provide enough light.
Task lighting is what is sounds like, light for performing specific tasks such as craft work, reading, cooking, etc and is typically focused on a small area and quite bright, though not too bright as this would cause eye-strain as easily as being too dim.
The second two kinds of lighting are to do with style; in other words how things seem and the mood they inspire.
Accent lighting is simply using light to pick out whatever features you want to enhance; these could be books on a shelf, sculpture, wood panelling, brightly colored fabrics, the shape of a piece of furniture, the line of a wall, anything really. The point to remember is that the light source itself should be inconspicuous – it is the thing being lit that is on show.
Decorative lighting is a variation on this theme, but the item on display is the light fitting itself. This could be a crystal chandelier or a beautiful Tiffany lampshade or recessed LED decor lights for example.
Combining these different types of lighting usually involves simply assigning each group to independent control switches. Where task lighting is concerned it should be obvious that it is desirable to be able to switch it on when performing the related task and switch it off otherwise.
Of the main lighting types, the most important is without question ambient lighting. Although it is the least noticeable it nevertheless provides the framework for the other types and thus determines how the overall effect appears. Accordingly, the single best piece of advice for creating successful home lighting has to be: control your ambient lighting with a dimmer switch.
How much accent lighting you use is pretty much a function of the availability of features suitable for accentuation, but if possible avoid clustering all your accents in one location. And finally, decorative lighting can be used wherever you feel there might otherwise be a gap in the lighting scheme or positioned to guide the eye to (or from) specific zones.
So that’s a brief overview of basic home lighting design, but there is much more to this topic than meets the eye (so to speak). For example, contemporary designs are increasingly based around LED lights, not only because of the stunning effects possible with LED lights, nor even because they are far and away the most efficient (and therefore cheapest) form of lighting, but for the simple reason that it won’t be too many years before LED has totally replaced all other forms of home lighting.