Home Lighting Ideas – A Room by Room Guide

From maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm to carrying out our jobs, light is an important aspect of our day-to-day life. Getting the lighting in our homes right is a key part of our relationship with light. This room by room guide will help you decide how to light your home and choose what elements you include in your lighting design. 

Before we crack on with illuminating your desire for all things home lighting, there are a couple of prior considerations to note… 

Main Categories of Lighting

Lighting often falls into one of these four main categories:

• Ambient or General – this kind of light is common in almost all rooms. Its purpose is to provide an even distribution of light that is warm and functional. This kind of lighting should be suitable for general tasks.
• Task Lighting is often used for carrying out just that – tasks. Make-up application, reading and food preparation are all variations of what a task (and task lighting) might encompass.
• Accent Lighting is used to draw attention to a specific feature of a room. This can be an architectural feature like a chimney breast, statement piece of furniture, or wall decoration like a table or painting. 
• Natural Light is perhaps the most important to consider here. It is the light caused by the sun and will be a key player in deciding what kind of lighting you go for.

Lumens and Kelvins – lighting guide know-how.

These two terms are going to help understand the demands of different rooms. 

Lumens refer to the quantity of visible light emitted by a single unit. The higher the number of lumens, the brighter the light. In many building regulations, a certain amount of lumens per square metre (lm²) is a standard requirement. Make sure you know how to calculate how many lm² the room you are designing requires before you start!  

Kelvin refers to the light’s temperature and is often shown via a colour chart that shows how light is categorised as either warm or cool. For simplicity, it would be fair to say amber and yellow tones are ‘warm’, and the whiter the light source, the colder it is.  

Room by Room Lighting

Each of the spaces in your home has unique characteristics, which means the room lighting design demands different things:

Living Room Lighting 

The living room can be one of the most fun and creative places in which to light. The hub of the home might include a combination of approaches from the home lighting ideas above. For a big, bold statement, you might opt for a really attractive centrepiece. 

You can get the best of both worlds by balancing the sophistication of a chandelier with the contemporary material feel of a brushed metal shade. You’ll want to make sure your living room ceiling light is eye-catching and memorable.

Around the living room might be interesting nooks and crannies that you’ll also want to draw attention to. This is where concealed, minimal and accent lighting plays the perfect part. Selecting the right wall light is a sure-fire route to great accent lighting. 

Dining Room Lighting

Settling down to eat is a crucial time of the day, so the lighting design here should be accommodating and inviting. Pendant lights with amber hues (remember that Kelvin scale!) are good additions to a dining room lighting configuration. 

Taking into account the length of your dining table and the shape of the room is essential before you decide what you want from your lighting design. It might take several lights to illuminate your dining area adequately.

Bathroom Lighting

The bathroom can be one of the more difficult rooms to design a lighting scheme for. Because of the safety regulations surrounding electrics, you may find yourself limited in updating your bathroom’s look. However, be reassured – you still have plenty of wriggle room when selecting the colour and hue of the bulbs themselves. 

Worry not! There are a few ways to go about creatively lighting the bathroom. Failing this, you can’t go far wrong with a well-placed illuminated mirror which is a welcome alternative style of accent lighting.   

Kitchen Lighting

A prime example of a room that demands good task lighting, the kitchen is important to get right. What could be worse than prepping a well-thought-out meal than doing so under a dingy, gloomy glow? 

Opt for a track light for directional lighting that can be adjusted to suit the various tasks that go on in even the busiest kitchen. It might be beneficial to think about energy-saving LED bulbs for the amount of use the kitchen switches get for the lighting design here. 

Bedroom Lighting

The uses of a bedroom go from the low energy, relaxing conditions needed for sleep and the brightness needed to prepare for the day ahead. Make use of the natural light as well as the changeability of a dimmer. 

As well as some creative ideas for bedroom lighting, you might also consider a wonderful statement lamp to provide optimum pleasure for that bedtime reading. 

Passageway Lighting 

Stairways, halls, vestibules and parlours all make up the kinds of spaces that sometimes escape our attention when thinking of lighting design. Home lighting design for these areas should, like dining areas, be warm and inviting – they are where we greet people, after all! Brilliant hallway lighting ideas should draw visitors eyes and lead them into the rest of the house. For stairways, try an upward-pointing wall light positioned at intervals as you ascend the stairs.  

Don’t forget about the outside!

Finally, what good is having the perfectly put-together room by room configuration if your external lights don’t show off the house before you’ve even entered? You have several opportunities for fantastic external illumination but starting with garden lighting is never a bad shout!