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Open-plan rooms are wonderfully free-flowing, but, without a little structure, they can feel more like a space than a home. Here’s how to use lighting to create invisible walls – the ‘architecture you can switch on’…
How can lighting help to define an open-plan space?
Open-plan living is wonderfully liberating … until you realise that when you knocked down the walls you also knocked out some of your home’s sense of shape and intimacy.
A big, open room can look marvellous in daylight. But once evening falls, it can easily become a bit odd, a bit ‘unresolved’ as designers say: bright everywhere but cosy nowhere. The kitchen, dining area and sitting room may all share the same footprint, but they do very different jobs.
That’s where lighting comes in. Used well, it can do a surprising amount of ‘architectural’ work. It can draw the eye, gather people around a table, give the kitchen its practical brightness, and make the sitting area feel truly inviting again. In other words, lighting can create the suggestion of walls… not solid ones, but softer, warmer and much more flexible ones.
Lighting as architecture: creating ‘walls’ of light
One way to think about light is as the architecture you can switch on.
A pendant over a table gathers the dining area into focus, while a pool of lamplight beside an armchair can create a reading corner. Wall lights and table lamps can soften the edge of a sitting area. None of these things interrupts that open-plan flow of the room, but they do give it a sense of shape.
The trick is not to light the whole space evenly. In fact, that’s often where open-plan lighting goes wrong. Too many downlights, or one general wash of brightness across the whole room can make a large space feel flat and strangely anonymous.
Instead, aim for layers: practical light where you need to see clearly, softer light where you want to relax, and a few beautiful focal points to give the room rhythm. Each area can have its own mood and purpose, while still belonging to the larger whole.
Here are a few ways to create walls of light in an open-plan room…
1) Use targeted lighting to define the kitchen area
In the kitchen, lighting has to earn its keep. Worktops, hobs and sinks need clear, practical light for chopping, cooking, washing up and finding the pepper grinder when someone has inexplicably put it in the wrong cupboard.
This is where focused task lighting comes in: adjustable spotlights, recessed fittings or under-cabinet lighting can all help make the working areas feel bright, clear and easy to use. The aim is to avoid awkward shadows, especially over preparation areas.
Then, once the practical layer is doing its job, you can add the personality. A pendant over an island, breakfast bar or central table can help mark out the kitchen as a place in its own right and not just a run of units at one end of the room.
Tip: Choose fittings that suit the job. Directional lighting is best for work surfaces; pendants are brilliant for islands, tables and areas where you want to create a sense of focus.
2) Create an island of light in the dining area
A dining table is one of the easiest places to define with lighting. Hang a pendant above it and, almost magically, the table becomes a destination.
It creates what you might call an island of light: a warm, inviting pool that draws people in and anchors the dining area within the larger room. This works beautifully with a single generous pendant, a pair of lights over a long table, or a cluster of smaller pendants for a more playful effect.
The same principle works over a kitchen island. A row of pendants can help turn an island from a useful surface into a regular gathering place into somewhere for breakfast, homework, drinks, chopping, chatting and pretending to help.
Tip: As a rough guide, position pendant lights around 75–90cm above a dining table or island. For particularly high ceilings, you may want to add a little extra height so the proportions feel right.
3) Use softer light to define the living area
The living area usually wants light at a more human height.
Ceiling lights can provide structure, and a beautiful pendant or chandelier can make a wonderful focal point, but it’s often the lower-level lighting that makes a sitting area feel properly settled: table lamps, floor lamps and wall lights that create warmth around sofas, armchairs and side tables.
This is where you can start to build a wall of soft light. A table lamp on a console, a pair of wall lights, a floor lamp beside a sofa, together, these create a gentle boundary around the living space. They don’t shut it off from the rest of the room, but they do make it feel like somewhere to stop, sit down and stay for a while.
And because open-plan spaces often have several competing uses, it’s worth thinking about how the room changes through the day. Bright and busy at breakfast. Practical in the afternoon. Softer, lower and more flattering by evening.
Tip: Dimmers are your friend. They allow the same space to move from homework-and-hoovering mode to drinks-and-dinner mode without any rearranging of furniture, family or guests.
4) Create a cosy corner with a floor lamp
Just because a room is open-plan doesn’t mean every inch of it needs to feel open.
Sometimes the most successful part of a large room is a small, inviting corner such as a chair by a window or a reading nook that feels slightly tucked away even when it isn’t physically enclosed.
A floor lamp is one of the simplest ways to create this effect. Place one next to an armchair or small sofa and you immediately make a little pool of purpose.
It also gives the room another vertical element, which can be very useful in open-plan spaces. Where furniture tends to sit low and horizontal, a floor lamp adds height, shape and a sense of punctuation.
Tip: This is where rechargeable lighting is especially clever: it lets you put light where the room wants it, not just where the electrician happened to leave a socket.
5) Balance warm and practical light
Brightness alone does not make a room well lit. In fact, too much brightness can be the problem.
In an open-plan space, the colour and quality of the light matter just as much as the amount of it. A warm, atmospheric sitting area placed next to a kitchen lit like a doctor’s surgery will never feel quite right. The room may be technically illuminated, but the mood will be all over the place.
For most open-plan living spaces, a warm white light of around 2,700–3,000K is a good starting point for the main lighting. This keeps the overall feeling soft, welcoming and domestic. You can then add brighter, more focused light where practical tasks require it: over worktops, beside reading chairs, or at a desk tucked into the corner.
The goal is balance. Each area should have the light it needs, but the whole room should still feel like one coherent space.
Tip: You don’t need every fitting to match, but a little visual connection helps. Similar finishes, repeated materials, related shapes or a shared colour palette can all help the lighting feel considered.
6) Let the room change
The great joy of open-plan living is flexibility. The same room might host breakfast, emails, family cooking, homework, supper with friends and a late-night glass of wine, sometimes all in one day.
So the lighting needs to be flexible too. Not one fixed solution, but a series of possibilities: brighter layers for the busy bits, softer pools for the calmer bits, and plenty of moments where the light helps the room feel more intimate, more useful and more alive.
Walls of light are not really about dividing a room in a heavy-handed way, but rather about giving an open-plan space what all good rooms need: shape and atmosphere, and a few irresistible places to gather. Browse all of Pooky’s lights here.