5 Tips for better living through better lighting

[Lana Lile]

How to save energy whether you're using incandescent lights or CFLs, and make your home look great doing it!

5 Tips for better living through better lighting: 

1. Think in layers of lighting.  Task Lighting, Ambient Lighting and Accent Lighting are the basics.  Task for tasks, Ambient for generally lighting a space or room, and Accent for aesthetics and controlling wandering eyes.  Not all activities are created equal and therefore require different lighting.  Tasks like chopping vegetables or reading a manuscript at your desk require lots of bright focused light while entertaining or dinner parties require something entirely different.  Build or adjust your lighting based
on your needs for getting things done and looking good doing it.  Just filling the house with a bright even coating of light from full-blast fixtures takes the least advantage of the home and its contents. 

2. Make it adjustable + changeable.  
Dimmer switches and track lighting as well as plug-in fixtures like floor lamps go a long way in fine tuning an interior (or exterior) environment.  Dimmers quickly and radically adjust mood and function of a room while track fixtures and floor/table lamps can put the right type of light in the right place at the right time.  Feel free to swing around and swap your tracks fixtures for just the right look and function you need.  Use floor lamps to read by or desk lamps for drawing.  Even mix spot fixtures for your art with pendant fixtures for your bar on the same track.  Try different lights on or off or dimmed up or down  depending on the time of day and how much daylight the room is receiving.  Experiment.  Use dimmers whenever possible so you always have options.  A room lit for its contents and your activities feels a lot better than one just filled up with light.  Be in charge, and light it as you see fit. 

3. Get the appropriate lamp.  There are as many type of lamps (light bulbs) out there as there are situations to light.  To choose a lamp, begin with what type your fixture will accept, say for example the standard size screw-ins we all grew up with.  Then ask how much light you need it to produce. (Higher wattage usually means more light produced.)  It is dimmable? (Many compact fluorescent lamps are not dimmable – if you prefer these bulbs, make sure to find the “dimmable” versions.)  If it's for the type of fixture where the lamp is exposed and part of the aesthetic, will a clear or a frosted lamp look best?  What shape do I want?  How about a long-and-skinny for a wine bottle shaped fixture or a standard round style for a table lamp with a shade.  What temperature of light do I want the lamp to make?  A warmer light color looks cozier and generally more homey (looks more like candlelight) while a cooler colored light is cleaner and more clinical feeling. 

4. Control what people see.  Designers often say "lighting is everything".  This is because if something is not lit, it almost doesn't exist!   Eyes in a room are drawn to whatever is bright and sparkles and/or stands out against the contrast of a dark background. So for your dinner party, have plenty enough candle light to sparkle and dance upon your silverware, accent lighting to color your artwork and just enough ambient lighting to see facial expressions.  Aim your tracks, light candles and dim your cans.  Toggle everything until the good stuff is lit and the rest falls back into relative darkness and shadow. Notice how much better food often looks in higher-end grocery stores as you cruise the aisles.  The food is clearly and precisely lit while the floor, ceiling and walls are barely lit at all and just recede.  Intentional lighting can create moods, change the size of rooms, clean up a powder-room and make a dessert taste better.  Play with your lighting and see what kinds of environments you can make.  Just remember: you decide where people will look and therefore what they see and what they don't. 

5. Turn the lights down and the candles up!  Once you have some kind of layered lighting (see point
1.) use it!  If everything in the room is lit up brightly, nothing becomes special and you consume a whole bunch more electricity than is necessary.  If you are reading a book, pump up that floor lamp and make sure it actually sits by the club chair at which you are reading.  At the same time, dim down those can lights that always seem to be set on full-blast and are lighting up a bunch of house, carpeting, walls and windows that you don't really need so bright.  Finally, use your accent lighting just enough to make your favourite things pretty and relevant to your interior.  For both function and aesthetic, light what you need, and dim down or turn off what you don't.  It's better for working, it's better for aesthetics and it
consumes a lot less precious energy which is good for your bank account and great for the environment.  

[Nancy Michaelis]

Love this! I'm convinced the reason everything looks so good at Ikea is due to lighting. This explains some of it - and gives me some things to think about in my house. Thanks!