Home Lighting Decor: Tips on Right Lighting for Every Room

Lights come in different types, functions, and even price. We need lights for basic illumination. We also need lights for home decoration and holiday decoration. Lights have different uses and proper use of lighting can create the expected effect. If you need to improve the lighting for your room, here are some tips on right lighting.

Lighting for Living Room

Usually we choose layering light for living room. Living room is where we gather for long stretches of time. We can use the lights for ambient illumination, such as bouncing lights off the ceiling. We can wash the walls with lights such as valance lighting, track lighting or recessed lighting which may just direct the light towards the walls. Usually, we use accent lighting for highlighting architectural element, such as a painting. Lights that focus on an art or plant needs to avoid overly heat or brightness. Living room is a room that creates a first impression on our guests, so we need to take into the function as well as decoration of the lights.



Kitchen Lighting

Kitchen involves various activities and focus on functions of food preparation as well as cleanup or even a gathering spot, so the light for kitchen is very important. Usually, we need to locate the sink just by the window, for maximum use of natural light. We can also choose a ceiling mounted or recessed lighting fixture for enhancing the natural light above the sink. We use under-cabinet lights for better illumination.

Bathroom Lights

Bathroom focus on personal grooming and the placement of lighting counts a lot. Usually, we choose central ceiling mounted light fixture that casts shadows on a person standing in front of the mirror. We can choose choose three wall sconces, two on either side of the mirror, and one on an opposing wall.

Outdoors Lights

Lighting for outdoor areas usually serves different purposes such as safety for night walk or aesthetics for beautiful tree. Outdoor lights needs to ensure quality and durability for the outdoor environment is so harsh. We usually light something close to our house, in the yard, and something in a far corner. For the front door, choose two wall-mounted fixtures. For yards, we can use the energy efficient LED lights. For decoration, choose some LED string lights to wrap the trees or choose some Christmas tree light for beautiful and glowing scene at night.

Lights for Dining Rooms

The primary focus of dining room lighting is the table. Usually, we choose the lights directly above the table together with dimmers for relaxing atmosphere when entertaining. Chandelier above the table together with a pair of wall sconces seem common.



Bedroom Lights

Bedroom is where we take a rest or read books before going to bed. We can choose wall mounted lights with adjustable arm for bedside reading. Besides, for a warm and cozy atmosphere in this special room, we need floor lamps, sconces or architectural lights for ambiance. Avoid  central ceiling-mounted fixtures.

Lights for Home Offices

For the proper home office lighting, we need first to figure out the tasks we offer perform there. For some common tasks such as working by the computer, we need light fixture which can not be reflected in a computer screen. Just place the light to the right or left side of our main work orientation. Choose indirect lighting for a home office .

Bright Ideas For Home Lighting

Among all the rooms at a house, living room serves as social center and always space for grand family activities, such as friends gathering, playing games, self-entertaining, watching TV, etc. Decoration for living rooms can be creative, especially about the lighting decor. Compared with bathroom or kitchen where the use of lighting fixtures will be limited by the built-in furniture or electronic devices, living room lighting decor is much more flexible.

In this space, we can apply recessed lights for glamour, down lights for dimension or the maximum brightness on the floor or furniture or led branch lights for adding more vividness to the house. The lighting used in living rooms will not be monotonous for we can apply different types of lights or we can make the lights clustered over one particular area or spread out in between. For the better home lighting decor, we still need to know much about questions such as how much light is needed for a certain room.

As for the proper amount of light for a certain room, here is a formula we can refer to. Multiply the length times the width of the room and multiply that number times 1.5. The result will be the wattage amount for proper lighting in a certain room. This formula has much to do with the dimension of the room. Here we give an example: a room measured 12*16, and the wattage amount should be 12*16*1.5, that is, 288 watts. Then we can get 8-light chandelier, each with 30 watts. The wattage amount is still a bit more than the actual need.

For the area with special task lighting need, maybe we need to add much stronger light, and we achieve this by multiplying the square footage of the rooms by 2.5. For example, the kitchen room where cooking and housework is frequent and this area needs much stronger light.

If we have a lot of artwork or anything related to art, we can try to use track lighting. The track lights can work well in illuminating architecture details, artwork, wall paintings, natural stone fireplace, bookcases or anything that we love to emphasize. The lighting to focal points will not only bring us ambient light, but also create any strong light to our eye. We can also add wall washers or recessed lights to the track lighting for ideal lighting effect.

One of the most applied techniques in lighting decor is wall washing. That can add light to a room by creating more shadows for texture accent. A wall wash can make a wall look very smooth and minimize the texture. For the better even illumination effect, lights are usually placed further away from the wall. Then how about the distance between the lights and wall. Follow this: mounting and spacing distance : 2-3 feet for ceilings up to 9' high or 3-4 feet for ceilings between 9 and 11' high. The wall washing can not only create aesthetic effect of wall glazing, but also make the full use of light reflected off the walls.

Often, lighting can be amazing in that proper lighting can bring a big change to a space, sometimes even on a limited budget. That's really what needs us to come up with more tricks and that's often achieved by using portable lamps or other decorative lights. It's common practice for home decor lovers to haul some floor or table lamp out from nooks and crannies in the house to create pools of light. That can create instant visual impact in the room. There are a lot of tricks for getting the most with the least money. But when using the lighting, we need to make sure, only illuminate what we really want to highlight.