A surprising skill in home lighting design is finding just the right amount of darkness…
One of the pure pleasures of lighting your home is that there is no single correct answer about how to do it, because, after all, it’s your home.
There are practicalities, of course: you need to be able to read your book, chop an onion and so on. But once the basics are covered, lighting becomes much more interesting and expressive. You can consider such questions as, “where do you want the room to glow?” and “what things do you want to draw attention to?”, and “where should the eye travel?”
In other words, you get to decide where the light falls, and just as importantly, where it doesn’t.
Shadow, as all great lighting designers know, is a necessary part of the composition. Not all gloom should be banished because a good room needs contrast and soft edges, while pools of light can’t exist unless there are darker areas around them.
In other words, the dark is doing half the work.
Start with life
Although it’s tempting to start with layout and measurements, a good way to think about lighting is to begin with the life of the room…. Where do people sit, read, set down a glass? A lamp by a sofa, for example, creates a small territory that encourages settling and lingering.
How do you want the room to feel? A table lamp on a sideboard or a pair of wall lights can make a space feel so much warmer and intimate but only if there’s contrast with darker, cooler areas.
It’s also worth thinking about people in a room. Restaurants do not generally light you like a dentist because soft, low, indirect light is kinder to faces. If a room is for people gathering, chatting or eating, it needs to be warm, layered and gentle around the edges (this is just good hospitality, not vanity).
Light unevenly
One of the easiest ways to make a room feel flat is to light it too evenly. Occasionally one needs proper brightness but nobody wants to live in a grocery store aisle. Atmosphere usually comes from contrast: if everything is lit to the same level in a general wash of light, the room loses its foreground and background, corners are brought forward and surfaces flatten out.
Pools of light allow the eye to move from one place to another, and they bring out features and textures. In an unevenly lit room, ceramic bases feel more sculptural, wood more rustic and so on.
It’s all a question of lighting the right bits… and this is where lighting gets creative, because it’s entirely up to you to decide which bits are right.
Use shades cleverly
Lamp shades are lovely things in themselves, but as your home’s own lighting director, you can use them in quite clever ways to manipulate and manage the overall feel of the room.
For example, to spread light softly and generously, use pale shades, while for a more intimate corner, employ a dark shade. A patterned shade gives you one pleasure by day and another by night, when the light begins to warm the color and texture. Pleats, gathers, scallops, silk, linen, paper, card: they all change not only how the lamp looks, but how the room feels around it.
Shade-choosing is a very good time to trust your eye. You do not have to get it “right” in some objective sense, you just have to notice the effect and whether you instinctively like it.
Is it doing what you want it to do? Is it throwing the light where you want it, and leaving the rest alone? If yes, carry on. If not, try another.
Let the dark do its bit
The reason lighting is such a joy for home-lovers is that you can experiment without breaking the bank or disrupting anything. Moving a lamp from one table to another is no great effort, and allowing a cordless light to wander around the house for a few evenings can be surprisingly revealing.
But the trick is not simply to keep adding light until the room is bright enough. Instead, try to notice what happens when you take light away, or move it, or lower it. What looks better when it is allowed to recede, and where does a pool of light feel most inviting because there is a little shadow around it?
Try turning off the overhead light, try lighting one side of a room more than the other. Place a lamp near something with texture (ceramic, timber, pleats, books, plants) and see how the shadows bring it to life…. Try leaving one corner alone entirely.
There is no need to get solemn about it. Lighting is a form of play as much as design. You are allowed to change your mind, and the loveliest rooms often come from a little trial and error.
Good lighting is a happy arrangement between glow and gloom, brightness and softness, what you reveal and what you leave unsaid. And remember, the dark is doing half the work.
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