Knowing how much light you need in a room is jolly useful, but some of the most revealing lighting questions have surprisingly little to do with lumens…
There’s quite a scientific way of looking at lighting, which is about lumens, and number of light sources in a room, and layering. And then there’s a slightly more human approach, which asks questions about where you look, where you sit and what you notice. And what happens to and in a room when the evening comes.
Here are some of those more leftfield questions...
1) What happens when you put the light on?
It sounds absurdly obvious, but give it a go and really try to notice… Does the room suddenly feel welcoming, or just a bit brighter? Does the light draw attention to the nicest parts of the room, or to a blank patch of carpet? Does everything feel rather flat?
We tend to think about lighting in terms of whether we can see sufficiently well. But it is also deciding what the room looks like.
So flick the switch and have a serious gander.
2) Where does your eye go when you walk into the room?
Lighting can subtly tell your eyes where to travel. If most of the light is concentrated in the middle of a room, the edges can disappear and the whole space may feel smaller. Put some light on a wall, into an alcove or beside a piece of furniture and suddenly there is somewhere else for the eye to go.
This is one reason a lamp tucked into a far corner can have an effect totally out of proportion to its size. So, even though you haven’t physically made the room any bigger, you’ve revealed more of it. It’s surprisingly effective.
3) What happens when you turn the big light off?
This may be the quickest lighting test of all: is there still a room there when you turn off the main overhead light?
If the answer is essentially no, a few well-placed lamps or wall lights can make an enormous difference. Rather than relying on one source to illuminate everything, you can have little pools of light around the room, each doing its own small job.
And, which is also useful, you then get to decide how much of the room you want at any particular moment.
4) Is there anywhere nobody ever wants to sit?
Most homes have a sort of inexplicable blank spot, which is usually a corner with a perfectly decent chair that nobody has sat on since approximately 2019.
But what if the problem of this wasted space is simply light? So a simple tip: try putting a floor lamp beside it or a table lamp within easy reach. You may well find that the chair suddenly has a purpose.
The same trick works with awkward alcoves and forgotten corners, and rechargeable lamps mean pretty much any space can be readily illuminated.
5) Where do you want the shadows to fall?
We spend a lot of time thinking about where we need light, and yet almost none about where we don’t. Yet shadows give a room depth. If everything is illuminated equally, everything can start to look rather flat.
So don’t automatically regard every darker patch as a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’. A bit of contrast between brighter and darker areas can make the brighter ones feel warmer and more inviting. Sometimes it’s best to leave the dark where it is, it’s perfectly happy right there.
6) Which things deserve to be shown off?
You might say that lighting is a form of room ‘editing’.
Perhaps there’s a painting you love, a beautiful vase, an old fireplace or simply a particularly pleasing bit of wall. Well, give it some light and it suddenly becomes part of the evening edition of the room.
A picture light can turn a favourite painting into a focal point, while a lamp beside an interesting object can do much the same thing more casually.
You can be quite subjective and personal here. Or to put it another way, instead of asking, “what should I light?”, you can ask, “What would I like to notice?”
And perhaps that is the best way to think about home lighting generally. Forget, for a moment, what a lighting scheme is supposed to contain and look at what actually happens in your room: where your eyes go, where people sit, what disappears after dark and which bits you particularly love.
The answers may tell you rather more than the rulebook.
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