How to Design the perfect Lighting Scheme for your Home

The weather here has not been great. It’s been grey and cloudy. And although I’ve managed to get my 11 year old out for walks every day for half an hour, most days we have been snuggled on the sofa watching Cobra Kai on Netflix.

 

I’ve been getting a couple of questions in relation to lighting lately and it got me thinking about how I approach lighting when it comes to design. Firstly, let me start by saying that lighting is a really big subject when it comes to interior design. I mean, I could go on for hours and hours about it and I love the topic. What it does to a room is totally transformative. 

 

However, for the purposes of today, I’m going to keep it short and go through the basics and how I use lighting to design a room. So let,s start. When it comes to lighting, and designing a room, there are three types of lighting you need to be aware of.

 

 

What ambient lighting does is helps to create the mood of a room. So for example, lights and fairy lights sit in the background and create pools of light throughout the room. A variety of this sort of lighting can create a really warm and inviting atmosphere within a room.

 

 

The second type of light is an accent light. So, if there is something within the room that you want to bring focus, for example, a gallery wall of some sort that’s full of art, you might want to put a couple of wall lights there to bring that wall into focus. Or you might have a really big bookshelf that is full of books and think about lighting the shelving to bring the books into focus.

 

 

And then the final type of lighting is called task lighting. And as you can imagine, task lighting is the most functional type of lighting. And it’s really based around activities within the room. So for example, if you are cooking in the kitchen, then obviously you need to make sure that you’ve got a light that is above the stove or the location of where you are chopping vegetables on the kitchen island.

 

So these are the three types of lights that I use when I’m designing the scheme for a room. I use a combination of all three, whenever I’m designing. So the first thing that I do is I think about the activities that are going to be performed in that room. And then I overlay the furniture so that I know where the furniture is going to go. And then finally, I overlay the electricals and the lighting. 

 

When it comes to designing the room, I always start with Task Lighting first, then Accent lighting and finally, I add the Ambient lighting to finish off the room.