Image top: @ourlittlebrickcottage
By day, a room shows you pretty much everything at once, but at night, you get to make an edit…
In daylight, your house is rather indiscriminate, a bit of an exhibitionist. There they all are: bookcase, the radiator, the lovely old chair, the bit of wall you’ve never quite known what to do with, all the rest of it.
But when evening comes, lighting gives you a choice… you can become your own room ‘editor’.
In other words, you can decide which bits come to the fore and which ones recede. You might give one corner a starring role and let another just sort of disappear; or you can show off certain things you love while pretending some of the others aren’t there.
You don’t have to show everything
There’s no reason every inch of a room has to be equally visible after dark. In fact, it’s generally much nicer if it isn’t.
Maybe you love the painting over the fireplace but feel fairly neutral about the shelves beside it. That’s absolutely fine: go ahead and light the painting and let the shelves fend for themselves.
Or it might be that there’s a lovely armchair in one corner which, if you give it a lamp, is suddenly a part of the room with a little life of its own.
Meanwhile, the tangle of chargers, dog toys and whatnot at the other end of the room can enjoy a bit of privacy. Lighting, like nothing else, lets you be selective.
Choose what gets the headline
Every room has some things you’d like people to notice first. It might be a fireplace, a handsome bit of joinery, a plant, a lovely lampshade or simply a particularly pleasing patch of colour.
Give that thing some light and it moves up the hierarchy.
Now that doesn’t necessarily have to mean dramatically spotlighting it as though it has just won an Oscar… A lamp nearby is generally enough, or sometimes a picture light.
The question to ask is: what do I want people in this room to notice tonight (even if ‘people’ is actually just you)?
Let some things disappear
As all good writers know, editing is at least as much about what you leave out, as what you keep in. The same is true of lighting and interior design.
It’s actually liberating to realise that you don’t need to solve every awkward corner or make every shelf important. The dark can often just stay dark.
Make an evening edition
The nicest thing about all this is that the night-time version of your room needn’t resemble the daytime one very much.
A dining table that looks fairly ordinary at four in the afternoon can become the obvious centre of the room once there’s a pendant glowing above it.
A chair nobody notices during the day can turn into the place everyone wants to sit once there’s a lamp beside it.
An unremarkable wall can suddenly look terrific because a pool of light catches the colour or texture in just the right way.
Nothing has physically changed. You’ve simply changed the edit.
…And why not keep changing it?
Unlike painting and decorating, lighting is gloriously non-committal.
Without any expense and minimal effort you can move a lamp, or switch one off, or put another somewhere unexpected, or light the picture instead of the table. Rechargeable lamps make this even easier, because you can move light around almost as casually as you move a cushion.
You might say that’s the true pleasure of lighting as room editing: there is no definitive version. Your room can have a work edit, a dinner edit, a Sunday-night edit, a reading edit, a people-coming-over edit…
So… what’s the edit this evening?