A well-planned layout and beautiful home decor are things that we mainly focus on while designing a room. But do you know what sets the mood? The lighting department does not receive the attention it needs. Lighting is sometimes an overlooked aspect of your home. The way you light your room has a massive impact on your mood, emotions, and overall well-being. To put it simply, our room lighting is closely tied to our daily lives. We have evolved from natural light to artificial lighting to bring the ambience we want.
From layering lights to chandeliers, we have thought of everything. But how do you know which is the best room lighting idea? In this article, we shall discuss the different types of room lighting ideas that can give you a cheerful and soothing atmosphere.ur home. Let’s get started.
3 Types of Lighting in Interior Designing
1. Ambient Lighting Or General Lighting
Your room’s primary light source is ambient lighting. It fills the space with soft lighting and improves vision, and it also brightens a large area. You can think of general or ambient light as natural light which is combined with light coming from normal room lights. With the ambient lighting in your home, you can move around safely.
2. Task Lighting
The lighting brightens a specific area like a book, work table, play area, or whenever you are performing a task. In other words, you could use task lighting for any close-range job, such as cooking, sewing, painting, and writing.
3. Accent Lighting
Accent lighting is the lighting that creates a mood in the space of your house by directing focused light to a point of focus. This type of lighting gives a dramatic vibe to your living room by lighting prominent items and eliminating forgettable regions. Accent lighting may be used to draw attention to artwork, bookshelves, furniture, and architectural details of your home.
5 Types of Lighting Fixtures
A lighting fixture, light fitting, or luminaire is an electric pump with a fixture body and a few lamps placed in hard-wired places or sockets. It is either attached to a ceiling or a wall from which you cannot remove the bulb easily. Here are 5 types of lighting fixtures that could be used as different room lighting ideas:
1.Surface Mounted Fixtures
Surface fixture lights are identifiable and lie level against the ceiling or wall of your home. These are used in the room, entryways, and living room of the house.
2. Pendant Lights
Pendant lighting is typically used in dining rooms and kitchens. A wire, cable, or chain suspends a pendant light from a high ceiling to light up a particular portion of the room and leave the rest of the area dim.
3. Recessed Lights
Recessed lighting is generally covered, in the ceiling space, so that the source of light cannot be seen directly. Recessed lighting is a type of lighting that is often in the shape of downlights or spotlights, and can be utilized in any room of your home.
4. Track Lights
Track lighting offers a wide range of lighting possibilities. On one track, there are many lights, each with its own circuit and voltage. If you have track lights in your home, you may hang them from the ceiling as pendant lights or have them surface-mounted like surface lights.
5. Portable Lights
Portable lights can be moved or changed from one place to another. Battery-operated portable lights are becoming increasingly common. They are generally connected to light electrical sockets by their cable. Desks and tables of the living room are common places for portable lights.
Home Lighting Design Ideas for Each Room: 7 Room Lighting Ideas
Now that we know the different types of lighting and light fixtures, let’s check out what kind of lighting goes for which room. The choice of lighting for each room depends on the purpose of the room. You cannot put up pendant lighting in a study room or put up accent lighting in your bedroom. Read on to know the basics of room lighting!
1. Utility Room And Garage
The utility room requires plenty of ambient lighting and recessed lighting because that’s where you keep your clothes, laundry, and stuff. The garage needs to have task lighting which can also be a combination of track lighting and higher-luminance pendant lamps.
A few important lighting tips for garage and utility room lighting ideas are
- Do not install recessed lighting in a garage as it will create shadows.
- Refrain from fixing the lighting over the top of a vehicle.
- Consider using task lighting only for repairs and fixing.
2. Living Room
The living rooms are a family gathering spot in the entire house. We do a bulk of our daily activities in the living room and having a lighting plan that works well enough is important.
The best living room lighting ideas would include recessed lighting and track lighting because they can be used to highlight any artwork, sculptures, or architectural elements of your living room.
Here are a few living room lighting ideas:
- Multiple lighting layers with dimmable light can be used to create a cosy atmosphere for weekend binge-watching.
- None of the lighting in the living room should be reflected off your television screen. That would be an issue for people prone to migraines. It is recommended to use dimmers and reduce the illumination level of the space.
- The living room lighting can be made more unique and attractive with the use of led bulbs, accessories, and portable lighting, along with ambient lighting.
3. Bedroom
Bedrooms require ambient lighting with a mix of task lighting if you want to read and do other personal tasks in the room. You also need a cosy vibe to have your beauty sleep and you would want to be woken up by natural light in the morning. Mixing natural light and cosy night lights is what you need in a bedroom. Here’s what you can do:
- Try putting up recessed lighting with lower controls, but avoid placing lights right above the bed.
- If you have a small and light-coloured room, you won’t always need ambient lighting because that’s mostly for large and dark-coloured rooms.
- If your room has a lot of mirrors, there may be sufficient reflective lighting from other sources (such as natural light) to compensate.
- If you want to highlight any artwork and other designs up to the walls of your bedroom, accent lighting would be the best.
- Smart lighting makes it possible to control the brightness levels with a remote or voice control. Depending on your current mood, you can adjust the lighting environment.
A few important lighting tips for your bedroom are as follows
- Use low brightness and shaded lighting in sitting areas.
- Use direct lighting for work tables and attached bathrooms.
- Use fluorescent light bulbs for closets, cupboards, and door frames.
- Use recessed lighting for the walls.
- Don’t fix light bulbs directly up your bed, because it can prick your eyes when it is turned on while you are in bed.
- Always use light bulbs with a lower voltage.
- Consider using coloured lamps to alter the atmosphere in your room.
- Choose energy-efficient lightings such as LEDs and CFLs.
4. Office Room
With work from home being the new trend, most people have set up an office room at home. Typically, accent and task lighting are to illuminate your office room but you should use a combination of ambient and accent lighting too.
- If you have a dark office space, ambient lighting is required, because it can provide more brightness to the room.
- If you want to be more productive at work, you can choose a room with natural lighting and good air. This work environment would set you up in a happy mood, improve your oxygen level, and make you more productive in the long run.
Here are a few important lighting tips that you need to consider for your office:
- Try to keep the brightness to a minimum, particularly on computer screens.
- To generate bright, low-glare lighting, use direct and indirect lighting.
- Make use of energy-saving light bulbs.
- Keep windows open to get enough natural light or sunlight for better productivity and healthier living.
5. Dining Room
The dining room is the main focal point in the house and a place where guests gather. It needs to be the best-lighted room in your house. We recommend putting the best form of hanging lighting right above your dining table while adding the walls with pendant lights or surface lighting.
While those are the common option, you could also install track lighting above the table. For a gentle glow, a fine glass could be used to decrease the light and give the table an appearance of a candlelight dinner.
The following are some of the best lighting tips you can incorporate in your dining room:
- Recessed lighting can be used to highlight artwork, decorative items, and valuable objects.
- Install under-cabinet lighting to draw attention to your cutlery and silverware in the room.
- If you have track lighting and recessed lighting in the room, try to direct the lights toward the walls of the room to create ambient lighting.
6. Kitchen
Modern-day kitchens have become a center of attraction where you not only cook food but also you can do a variety of tasks such as cleaning and socializing with people while cooking. Since the kitchen lighting is complex, use recessed lighting.
To provide an aesthetic appeal and brighten your kitchen areas, mix under cabinet lighting with recessed lighting in your ceilings to decrease reflections and glare on cooking appliances. Led bulbs in your kitchen allow you to create a romantic environment by dimming the lights or raising the lights to provide enough task lighting for hobbies and other activities. to
Lighting Tips For Kitchen
Mentioned below are a few simple lighting tips which you can try to use in a kitchen.
- To provide task illumination for your kitchen counter, install under cabinet lighting underneath the drawers.
- Overhead pendants or chandeliers should be used in focal areas such as the kitchen island and dining table.
- It is better to use energy-efficient light bulbs such as LEDs because the kitchen is used very frequently.
7. Bathroom
Recessed lighting is the most common type of lighting which is used in a majority of bathrooms. because it is known to clear the space and provide a clean and glare-free look inside the bathroom. Also, you can try to allow some natural light to enter from the windows of your bathroom. Adding windows in your bathroom will also ensure that space is well ventilated and also receive sunlight.
Lighting Tips For Bathroom
The following are some important lighting tips that you can consider adding to your bathroom.
- If you have a bathtub install Led lights above the head.
- Add task lights around the mirrors in the bathroom.
- Use hanging light bulbs above the sink.
- Choose a combination of ambient light, such as chandeliers and pendants, to ensure that light is spread equally.
5 Aesthetic Lamps and Room Lighting Ideas
Here are a few distinguished lamps you could add as decor and as a source of lighting in your house:
1. Oversized Statement Light
This indicates huge floor lamps that can function as an art piece in the room while giving you enough light to do sitting activities like reading or knitting. You need to have another primary source of lighting because a lamp cannot illuminate the entire room. Select a lamp that looks good even if it’s not turned on.
The Scandi-style tripod lamps are quite affordable but you could also go for the classic mid-century Arco floor lamps. These oversized statement lamps are typically placed in the living rooms but you could install them in any room you want (maybe that cosy corner in your bedroom needs one).
2. Moroccan Lantern
You don’t need a Moroccan interior design to incorporate this dreamy, metal Moroccan piece of art. It can add a touch of whimsy to an eclectic decor in the room while throwing magical shadows around the room. We’d say this ceiling lighting is best to be hung at the centre of the living and dining room ceilings. Read more about Moroccan-inspired decor ideas to find different ways of instilling them in your home.
3. Wall Light
wall lights can double as decor and can give you a cosy vibe in the room with their dim illumination. Thus, it’s best for living rooms and bedrooms or wherever you spend your weekends. It can be put in the living room as a decor (most wall lights can also double up as mirrors) and in the bedroom as your nightlight. You could install it right above your bed and we assure you it’s a complete mood-setter.
4. Candlelight
The word instantly reminds you of romance, right? This is the ultimate source of illumination for those much-awaited dinner dates in your dining room. These can even be hung in your kitchen to give your cooking space an old-school charm. Transport any room in your house (except bedrooms because we don’t want lights to shine directly on our eyes) into a welcoming and inviting space with these candlelights. Mix candlesticks in different materials and styles to get their full charm.
5. Fireplace
What’s more welcoming than the gleaming warmth of a fire? And you don’t want to leave the fireplace empty during warm weather. It can make you feel that the room is too cold. So, install an overhead lighting fixture with wall sconces and warm-coloured light bulbs. This will lend an even glow to the room or you could even fill your fireplace with eco-friendly LED candles with convincing flicker flames.
Closing Thoughts: Interior Lighting and Room Lighting Ideas
As mentioned earlier, a room’s lighting is defined by its purpose and the right choice of lighting will serve the purpose well. One influences the other. The amount of natural light each room receives determines the lighting settings in that room. Take advantage of natural light whenever you can; it will immensely improve your health and mood. Go through our different types of lighting and lighting fixtures to choose the type of lighting that suits your room well.
Home Lighting Design Ideas FAQs
1. What lighting is best for bedrooms?
A bedroom needs to be calm and soothing to the nerves. You could add neutral or warm light temperatures between 2700K and 3000K. Incandescent bulbs often come in this range.
2. How do I get good lighting in my room?
Good lighting can bring a huge difference to the ambience of your room. Here are some room lighting ideas to choose from
3. How can I brighten a room without overhead lighting?
Ceiling lights can be a problem if you are prone to migraines. Instead, install these alternatives:
4. What are the 4 types of lights in home decor?
The four types of room lights ideas that you can draw inspiration from are
5.
What is the most attractive lighting?
The best illumination comes from 2700 kelvins light bulbs. Most bulbs whether they are halogen, compact fluorescent, LED, or incandescent, are labelled warm white or soft white which indicates 2700K to 3000K. They will be labelled