Your friend decides to redesign her living room, buy new furniture, decorate with new paintings, and choose a new rug. The room looks perfect in the pictures. However, when you finally find some time to go there and spend an evening in the room in the dark, you feel somehow cold there. Something is wrong, but it is not terrible. What is it? In most cases, there is only one reason why rooms seem not quite comfortable: their lighting.
That is one mistake that does not appear obvious. The bulbs are good; the fixtures do not break, so the room looks okay in all the pictures. Yet, people make some small mistakes in their houses every day, and that is how they prevent themselves from making rooms look more welcoming. Let’s see what those mistakes are.
Relying on One Overhead Lighting Fixture for Everything
There is one thing in common in almost any house – an overhead fixture that illuminates the whole room. Usually, there is just one fixture placed on the ceiling. It is fine, but it is insufficient. An overhead lighting fixture provides only one light source for the entire room, which means that the lighting will be rather homogeneous, with no shadows or contrasts created. And no contrast means that rooms will seem sterile, whatever beautiful design elements you put there.
Think about the last restaurant or hotel lobby that impressed you with its warmth. It is hardly possible that this place is illuminated with one bulb on the ceiling. There were probably some lamps somewhere in the corners or some other fixtures creating contrasts.
However, such lighting is not often used in homes because this harsh overhead lighting is what came with the house when people bought it.
Bulb Color That Is Not Right for a Room
Even if the house has multiple sources of light installed, they still might not warm up the atmosphere of a room due to an incorrect color of light. There is a certain scale used to measure the light produced by bulbs, and the colors that are on the bluish side of this scale create quite a harsh light that is suitable for a kitchen or office. However, such light left for a living room or bedroom will make people feel as though they are in a hospital.
It is one of the most difficult-to-spot mistakes related to lighting design, as it does not involve the number of fixtures installed in a room at all. Thus, a perfectly well-layered living room may become very cold if the bulbs of all the sources are the wrong color. Warm colors, which resemble candlelight, are preferable for relaxing rooms, while cool colors are better to use for rooms where people perform activities.
A walk around the house room by room only in order to check the bulb colors could reveal a great deal about whether the atmosphere of the house is comfortable or not. It might turn out that the reason for a sterile atmosphere is nothing more than a mismatched set of bulbs bought without paying much attention to them in the shop.
Lighting a Room From One Level Only
There is ceiling lighting because this is where the wires are installed. However, if a room is illuminated only from above, it misses one level of light, which makes a huge difference in terms of the room’s look. If light is brought closer to the place where people gather or work, it will change the atmosphere completely. In this case, a surface downlight is quite useful because it can be placed near a reading corner, seating area,e or counter.
The moment when light is brought from multiple levels of the room means that the room is well-lit rather than just illuminated by a single source of light. The layering of light sources does not necessarily have to be complicated. An additional light at a lower level, together with the ceiling lighting, is sufficient for bringing the necessary contrast to the room.
These lighting tips for interiors are quite insignificant on paper. However, it is usually these kinds of details that differentiate an acceptable room from the perfect one in the listing photos.
Spaces That Make The First Impression Unconsciously
While people tend to decorate those spaces where they spend most of their time, such as bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms, other spaces in a house may remain unnoticed and left untouched. Stairwells, corridors, entryways – those are the spaces that rely upon the light coming through from the rooms.
However, the importance of lighting up such areas cannot be underestimated. Indeed, a corridor usually appears to be the first impression a guest gets and the last one before leaving a house. It creates a slightly unwelcoming home ambiance, which comes as a surprise, as the main effort is done to make the living areas look good while the rest remains dark and unfinished.
Such spaces may go unnoticed for years as people tend to overlook them while walking through. However, a visitor can sense that something is wrong in such areas even if he or she cannot explain what exactly has created this feeling.
Simple Steps Towards Improving The Dark Corners Of A House
The best solution for fixing these areas in a house is indoor wall light. Such items do not have to be bright and fancy; on the contrary, they should be minimalistic and subtle enough to illuminate such areas and show that someone pays attention to this space. Usually, houses that make a welcoming impression right from the start are designed this way.
It usually requires spending the least amount of money and effort out of all possible ways to improve home ambiance. Moreover, it is one of the fastest solutions as well.
Lighting: Nothing Instead of Lighting the Interesting Thing
Even if a room is properly lit, it may still feel oddly flat when the lights don’t point at anything interesting. Many fixtures illuminate an open floor or the middle of the room and miss something worth noticing – art, a bookshelf, or some textured wall – right beside them, just a couple of feet away.
A room needs to be lit in order to create visibility; however, good lighting can also direct a person’s eye. Small beams of light focused on what makes the room special would create a much more appealing place to be instead of an evenly distributed light that shines on everything in a room. Track light is especially useful in this situation, as each head could be adjusted independently and shine directly onto the artwork, bookshelves, or textured wall rather than on nothing.
It sounds quite simple – from lighting a room to lighting its contents – but it changes the way we perceive the environment drastically. It is one of the easiest upgrades from this list to make.
Warmth Can Be Created with Proper Placement
All these tips won’t require tearing out the walls and redoing everything from scratch. A true cold room fix cannot be done by buying even more lights. It requires proper placement of the existing or additional fixtures in the places where it matters. Slightly different ceiling heights in the living room, slightly warmer bulbs in the bedroom, and a new light fixture in a hallway that was always too dark.
Once you notice all these patterns, it is hard not to see them, but the good news is that it is easy to correct them. There is no need for your house to be brighter to feel warmer; it only needs to place the light correctly.
