Indoor & Outdoor Lighting Ideas
Lighting dictates the way we perceive the reality that exists all around us. It's only natural that it can make all the difference in interior design as well. There's a countless number of lighting-oriented combinations that can completely change the outlook of your home. In the same principle, using lighting in the wrong way can make your home feel dreary, dull, and grey.
Therefore, it's essential to do some research before diving into the world of lighting. There are many great tips on how to transform your home using lighting in different ways. All you need to do is choose the ones that resonate with you while complementing your home.
Think about what you're trying to achieve
A great piece of advice for finding the overall vibe of your home is to understand your taste. You can do this by creating a vision board of all the different interior design ideas you're drawn to. Besides being a fun project, having a clear layout of what you're going after can be very helpful.
Once you get some sense of your taste, try to pay attention to the different effects that the lighting on your vision board creates. Very often, we don't even particularly like the room that we're drawn to. Its furniture, colors, or layout are not something we would pick. However, we like the way everything is presented and goes together because of the lighting. This comes to show you just how much you can transform your home using lighting.
Lights can be a great accessory
If we were to look at a house as if it were an outfit, the lights would surely be an accessory. It's a well-known fact that a great accessory is a game-changer. If you find a way to accessorize in your living room the right way, you can get away with many other seemingly more pressing design matters. Once you realize how to transform your home using lighting as an accessory, you can begin to create focal points in your rooms. The human eye will naturally go to the brightest point in the room. It's essentially the same principle used in art and makeup. The highlighted points stand out and catch the attention of the beholder. In that respect, you can accentuate a spot by shining some light on it. That's why it's essential to correctly illuminate these focal points to achieve the effect you're truly after.
Use the combination of natural and artificial lighting correctly
As you're aware, all the rooms in your home are three-dimensional. This gives you plenty of variety and options when it comes to lighting placement. It can be recessed in the ceiling, inserted in the floor, or the walls, and anywhere in between. It can also come in numerous shapes and sizes. Gathering all these elements and taking them into account will help you build a lighting scheme that you're going for.
Failing to recognize the distinction between natural and artificial light is one of the common mistakes people make when decorating. Moreover, people tend to forget to consider the amount of natural light a particular room will get. Never underestimate the role that the outside lighting will play in the interior of your home. Instead of disregarding it and shutting down the blinds, celebrate natural lighting.
It's tough, if not impossible, to recreate and replicate its purity. Of course, depending on the area you live in and how much light your windows let in, the natural light in your home will vary. It would be ideal if we could all live in a house with a marvelous skylight in the sunniest of climates. However, we have to work with what we have and use natural light to the maximum. Another great repercussion of relying more on daylight is that it'll be more energy efficient.
Pay attention to the outdoors as well
No rule prohibits you from applying the same principles you've worked with indoors to the outdoor of your home. On the contrary, you can have a lot of fun with outdoor lighting and even get away with some things you couldn't in interior design.
If there's anything that can set a perfect atmosphere for a cozy Saturday wine-infused conversation between close friends, it's dreamy lingering lights on a patio in the backyard. Even if you live in a climate that doesn't allow you to spend much time outside, you can add some blankets and patio heater lamps to the equation and enjoy a cooked meal with your family.
There are many different types of lighting
There's genuinely an insane amount of different types of lighting that can help transform your home in various ways. However, if you're a newbie, knowing the three principal ones will suffice. These are ambient, task, and accent lighting.
- Ambient
This type of lighting's primary purpose is to light up a room completely. It covers the whole space at the same time equally. There's an entirely uniform level of lighting, and it's not in any way dependent on other types of lights. It's great in combination with reflective surfaces since it bounces off of them and creates an illusion of an even brighter space.
- Task
This type of lighting is more productive in nature. It's not meant to serve as an aesthetic intensifier at all. Task lighting shines a light in areas where we perform all the tasks we carry out during our days, such as cooking, cleaning, reading, etc. To be pleasant and not clash with the other types, it's usually not harsh or too striking.
- Accent
The accent type of lighting is used to point out a specific focal point or achieve the desired effect. It can give away an impression of a larger space. It highlights features such as art, plants, different sets of objects purely for aesthetical purposes.
Use lighting amplifiers
In simpler terms, lighting amplifiers are surfaces that can reflect light better than most. One of the best lighting amplifiers out there is, you guessed it, mirrors. By using mirrors, you can amplify the brightening effect of your lighting and the atmospheric and tone-setting one. All this, of course, depends on many surrounding factors in your home.
However, in most cases, you'll be able to get away with simply placing a mirror opposite or next to a lighting fixture that you're trying to accentuate. It will effortlessly capture and harvest whichever light source you feed it.
Transporting lamps – be careful
If you have decided to transform your home using lighting, you may have to do some renovating. One of the most challenging parts of any moving, renovating, or decluttering experience is managing all your valuable and fragile items.
Once the project is finished, it would be a shame to let it all go to waste because you failed to carefully protect and store your lamps and other delicate objects. This is why you should take some time and research some tips for storing breakables of great value before you actually do it. It may be best to hire a company experienced in this sort of thing.
Create the feeling of room dividedness
If you live in a studio apartment or an open concept home but wish to seemingly divide that space, you can easily do so just by using lighting cleverly. By combining different lighting strategies, you can transform your home and create a feeling there are more rooms in a single space.
Using different tones for different parts of the room will already make a huge difference. However, make sure that these tones, although different, aren't clashing with one another. Choose lights that'll complement each other and make your home cohesive. Another trick is to place the lights to face the centers of the areas you're looking to create.
Think about the environment
The environment is the last thing we think about while designing the interior of our homes. Nonetheless, being eco-friendly is a must. There are many different ways in which you can live more sustainably. One of the easiest would be to watch your habits.
Make sure that you're not overusing your lights when you don't need them. A more devoted but challenging approach would be to use solar-powered lights and other eco-friendly gadgets. It's important that everyone does the best of their abilities.
Positioning is everything
Once you become familiar with the different effects and functions lighting can have, it's time to learn about some other tricks. You cannot transform your home using lighting with just a one-trick pony. The placement of your lighting will make a massive impact on the overall look of your home.
For example, using simple ceiling lighting will have a specific effect, different from a bunch of smaller lighting fixtures all around it. The latter would create a much softer, more mellow, and intimate glow that'll set a completely different atmosphere. The choices you make will depend on your personal preferences and the space you are working with.
