Home Interior Lighting Ideas

Fancy your home looking as atmospheric as a movie set? Well you can, because with a little planning and a considered use of modern home lighting systems it has become easy to create a dramatic and adaptable domestic space.

In general there are three types of lighting - ambient, task and accent.

Ambient: The natural light which enters your home through windows or skylights.

Task: A light which serves to illuminate and offer greater contrast to a single work area or space that serve a specific function.

Accent: This sort of lighting is purely decorative and used to highlight pictures, plants or interior features.

Becoming familiar with these types of lighting will help you make decisions more confidently when judging what kind of lighting system with suit your home.

Planning your Lighting

Magazines and catalogues serve as great sources of inspiration for the different intensities and styles of lighting available - start a mood board for each room as a collection of inspirational images to help you visualise your lighting plan.

Sketch out the floor plan of your home and make a note of furniture and household features in relation to existing electrical sockets. This is useful to get an idea of how rooms are used, which way people are usually facing in a room, the location of ceiling lights and whether there is a need for more electrical sockets.

Note down the key function of rooms and also mark where natural light enters during the day as well as whether there are any displays or hangings which may require illumination.

Lighting for your Living Room

Being such a social space the living room is often filled with items on display from collections of books to pictures and various ornaments. It is the right kind of environment where accent lighting such as directional lights can be used to great effect to pick out displays.

Being a functional space too, it is useful to have table lamps around the periphery of a room, partly to serve to illuminate areas where people sat might want to read, but also to throw light inwards making the room feel cosy.

Uplighters are great alternatives to ceiling lights for bouncing light off the ceiling around the room, while floor lamps can be used as more decorative features such as the paper column floor lamp, or more purposefully such as adjustable reading lamps.

Light up your Bedroom

Good bedroom lighting will help you to relax and unwind. The most important lights in a bedroom are beside the bed, useful for late night reading or low mood lighting. These can be simple table lamps, wall fixtures or even downlights.

Having good natural light in a bedroom is desirable, so aim to make the most of that - but for those dark winter evenings and early mornings a bright ceiling or wall light will help to rouse you from your slumber. Fitting a dimmer switch is great for a quick solution to achieving the right mood too.

Kitchen Lighting

People have a lot of fun lighting kitchens - especially with use of pendant lights over breakfast bars. If not these, then a row of downlighters are also an attractive option with the added benefit that being recessed they are shielded from grease and dirt.

Task lighting under kitchen cabinets is useful for helping when cooking and preparing foods; the light should ideally be similar to natural light to make the task of chopping, peeling and processing your food as easy as possible . Perhaps even install light sensors so your worktop lights come on automatically when you use the worktop.

Directional lights on a ceiling are great for picking out kitchen cupboards and other features in the kitchen that might be on display - gastronomic gadgets, gizmos and cookware can form an attractive collection so a good lighting display will help to emphasise your gleaming artillery of appliances.

Don't overlook the chandelier, it can add a touch of glamour to a dining room, hall way or your living room too - ideal for higher ceilinged room and with such a multitude of designs large and small it is an easy and effective way to transform any domestic space.

Approach your home interior as if you can light it any which way you want - as a filmmaker might approach a set. Then look at your existing features, find the mood you want to create, identify what needs to change - then make it happen.