By Tim McKeough
Lighting can have a dramatic effect on the way a room looks and feels. When designing a home, planning the lighting scheme is “beyond critical,” said Alex Miller, a partner at the New York-based architecture and lighting design firm Taylor and Miller. “Lighting is a very soulful thing,” he noted, which directly changes the way we perceive a space.
“When you walk into a restaurant, a home or a hotel room, and think it’s cold or uninviting, it’s usually not the architecture,” Mr. Miller said. “The problem is usually the lighting. If the lighting was intimate and warm, then your perception of the space would be different.”
At the same time, lighting has an important functional role to play by illuminating circulation paths, work areas and decorative objects. In some rooms, having the ability to adjust the lighting helps them serve multiple purposes, such as a dining area that doubles as a place for homework or a media room that can also be a place for exercise.
Mr. Miller and other architects and designers typically create appealing, functional lighting schemes by layering different types of fixtures together rather than blasting a room with a single overpowering light. Here’s how to do it like the pros do.
Take Stock of Natural Light
Any lighting scheme should begin with a consideration of the most important lighting element of all: the sun. In dense cities like New York, “natural light is such a commodity that we’re always looking for ways to maximize it,” said Tim Bade, a partner at the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Bade Stageberg Cox. “Then, how do we complement that with artificial light?”
When the firm was designing a corner apartment in Manhattan with windows on two sides, for instance, they sought to allow natural light to flow through the various living areas by dividing the living room from the dining area with a translucent screen and an office with bookcases featuring glass back panels.
It’s also worth considering how the color of light changes throughout the day, from bright bluish light in the morning to warm, yellow light in the late afternoon, said Martin Cox, another partner at Bade Stageberg Cox. “In the morning, the light from the east is cooler,” said Mr. Cox, “and in the evening, as the sun goes down, it gets warmer. So the mood and ambience naturally changes across the day,” he noted.
Having layers of light fixtures that can respond to those changes can help make a home feel welcoming throughout the day.
Begin With General Illumination
For artificial light, start by planning the fixtures that will provide general illumination by delivering a wash of light over most of the room. In new homes, this is often a single, bright flush-mounted ceiling fixture at the center of a room or a grid of recessed can lights overhead. Either option will light up a room, but neither typically creates much atmosphere.
To do better, designers embrace a wide range of alternatives. Taylor and Miller frequently uses concealed fixtures to wash walls and ceilings with light instead. “We’re not installing grids of down-lights,” said Aoife O’Leary, a partner at the firm. “We’re interested in ambient lighting.”
The firm sometimes hides linear light fixtures inside coves, on top of wainscoting or behind built-in furniture. Other times, they conceal ordinary bulbs in sockets behind custom metal shades that direct light up columns or across walls.
The New York-based interior designer David Frazier often uses pendants with large-scale paper shades by designers such as Isamu Noguchi or Ingo Maurer as sculptural statements that happen to glow. “They provide this really warm, kind of moody light,” Mr. Frazier said.
Split Light Into Multiple Fixtures
Another option is to break up ceiling lights into a few decorative pendants. When New York-based Dunnam Zerbini Design was designing a media room for a client in Manhattan, the firm split the ceiling lights into four pendants with string-wrapped shades by Paul Marra.
“It’s a creative look that gives you balanced lighting,” said Kelly Zerbini, a partner at the firm. “We do this sometimes so there’s not such a clear, definitive center point.”
Other times, the firm opts to use numerous wall sconces around a room. “That feels very human in scale and keeps the perimeter of rooms from being these dark areas where nothing’s happening,” Ms. Zerbini said.
Even if you do have one light fixture at the center of a room, you can choose a fixture that doesn’t just blast a room with light from a single source. When Mr. Frazier designed the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment, he installed a Serge Mouille fixture with three arms at the center of the ceiling.
“Those arms are positioned so they’re actually illuminating art on the walls,” Mr. Frazier said. “When we use overhead lighting, we try not to have it beaming down, where you feel like you’re a French fry under a heat lamp.”
Define Functions With Light
The next step is to bring light to different functions within the room. In homes with an open floor plan, for instance, ceiling lights and pendant lamps can demarcate separate areas.
When the New York-based lighting designer Staci Ruiz was working on a home in Brooklyn, she used a pair of decorative ceiling lights to illuminate the kitchen island, under-cabinet lights to illuminate counters, a pendant to highlight an adjacent dining table and a recessed ceiling light to brighten a window seat.
“It’s purposeful lighting,” Ms. Ruiz said. “The light is exactly where it’s supposed to be, and you don’t need much more.”
Floor lamps, table lamps and swing-arm sconces can do the same thing beside sofas and chairs in a living room, and beside beds in bedrooms, bringing light to each and every place someone might want to read a book.
Of course, choosing lamps is also an opportunity to bring more sculptural elements to a space. “In the same way that we think about having a diversity of lighting sources, we think about having a variety of shapes,” in both lamps and lampshades, Mr. Frazier said.
When choosing fixtures for a study in upstate New York, for instance, he purposely mixed shades with spherical, conical and rectangular shapes for visual variety.
For more focused work at a desk or table, decide how you will light the top. A table lamp might suffice, but articulating task lamps can bring light precisely where you need it.
Illuminate Accents
Beyond serving functional areas, light can add drama to decorative elements like paintings and sculpture. When Taylor and Miller renovated a living room with a high ceiling in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the firm installed a small pendant that reaches down to eye level to illuminate sculptures on a table in one corner.
“We have art lighting in just one beautiful dropped pendant,” Ms. O’Leary said, which makes it a dramatic focal point.
Mr. Frazier used a minimalist task lamp in his bedroom to illuminate collected objects on a console table. “It washes those sculptural objects, almost like a cabinet of curiosities,” he said.
For wall-mounted works, hard-wired or corded picture lights can similarly highlight special pieces while adding a gentle glow to the room.
Take Control
With so many different fixtures in a room, controlling them all might seem daunting.
Smart-home systems, such as Lutron’s Caséta, make it possible to control all the fixtures with a single command from a wall-mounted switch or smartphone app, and to configure different lighting scenes where numerous fixtures are dimmed to preset levels.
“Lighting control systems are much more accessible than they used to be,” Mr. Miller said. “Fifteen years ago, to get lighting scenes in a space would have cost you $50,000; now you can get basic systems from Home Depot that give you that same capability for far less.”
When you arrive home and summon your well-designed layers of light to illuminate a room just as you want it, he noted, “it’s magical.”
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