You know how some people have homes that look as though they ought to be on the cover of a chic magazine? Ever wondered how they manage to get that look? Well it’s no big secret – it’s mostly down to lighting.

Like most of us I expect you’re quite familiar with the sparkly lighting found in up-market stores and though I’m sure you’ve never personally been thrown into a grim prison cell you almost certainly recognise the stereotypical image from countless movies of a single light bulb that’s way too bright. Would you consider using either of these as a design influence for your own home lighting?

But the extraordinary thing is that a surprisingly large number of people actually do veer towards one or the other of these polar opposites creating an outcome that is as predictable as it is hideous. Rooms where the lighting is principally provided by overhead ambient light invariably acquire a flat, drab and featureless quality that almost saps the soul. Rooms full of strong accent lighting and eye-catching feature lamps might look impressive with their barrage of dramatic shadows and powerful contrasts but are almost certain to cause eye-strain and give you a headache in short order.

The trick to designing successful home lighting is to ensure that you incorporate all four of the fundamental lighting types, which are: accent, decorative, task and ambient. Of course it will be necessary to alter the balance between these various elements in order to suit the required purpose or look, but the central idea remains: the best home lighting is achieved through a blend of these main lighting types and not just using one or perhaps two.

Consider an example using music, where a band consists of lead guitar, vocals, drum and bass. It’s perfectly normal for any one element to be noticeably louder or quieter than the others, but if one drops out totally or instead drowns out the others then it is instantly apparent that the sound is simply not quite right, and this exact same principal applies to lighting.

So what are these four main light types and how exactly should you blend them to design effective lighting?

These first two are concerned with function, in other words usable light.

Ambient light is characterized as appearing to fill a space with diffuse light and is often provided in domestic settings by central ceiling roses and in working environments by fluorescent strip lights. The point of ambient light is to create a foundation of background light on which to mount the other types. In the absence of ambient light other types of lighting paradoxically don’t produce enough luminosity yet also appear too bright (because they contrast too strongly against the background).

Task lighting is for assisting with particular tasks, for example food preparation, school homework, reading a magazine, and so on. It should illuminate only the zone where the task is to be performed and be bright enough to see clearly but not so bright as to cause glare and strain the eyes.

The second group of lighting relates to style and the things appear; creating atmosphere if you like.

Accent lighting is simply using light to pick out whatever features you want to enhance; these could be books on a shelf, sculpture, wood panelling, brightly colored fabrics, the shape of a piece of furniture, the line of a wall, anything really. The point to remember is that the light source itself should be inconspicuous – it is the thing being lit that is on show.

Decorative lighting performs a similar function to accent lighting with the main difference being that instead of illuminating something else while taking a back seat role, the light fixture itself is centre stage. Tiffany style lamps come to mind as a classic example of this genre.

Combining these different types of lighting usually involves simply assigning each group to independent control switches. Where task lighting is concerned it should be obvious that it is desirable to be able to switch it on when performing the related task and switch it off otherwise.

Possibly the most important of the lighting types to get right is the one that is least noticed – ambient lighting. Varying the levels of ambient light completely alters how the overall effect looks and if you were to adopt only one measure to enhance your home lighting, then controlling your ambient lighting with dimmer switches would be the one to go for.

The use of accent lighting tends inevitably to be driven by the availability and location of features you want to accent, but try not to focus it all in one spot. Finally, decorative lights can be positioned anywhere you like really, but in practice are often used to either fill in gaps in the lighting scheme or to deliberately draw the eye in certain directions.

So that’s a brief overview of basic home lighting design, but there is much more to this topic than meets the eye (so to speak). For example, contemporary designs are increasingly based around LED lights, not only because of the stunning effects possible with LED lights, nor even because they are far and away the most efficient (and therefore cheapest) form of lighting, but for the simple reason that it won’t be too many years before LED has totally replaced all other forms of home lighting.

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