Interior design is one of the most gratifying but challenging aspects of home decoration that we can come up against. It is not easy to decorate our homes, and in many situations, it can be downright challenging. However, at Urban Ashram we regularly help people find the right interior decorations that can turn their homes around. No matter what kind of décor you choose, though, without the right lighting, you are likely to run into problems!
The role of lighting in interior design is often overlooked. With the right lighting, though, you can create focal points in the room that can draw the attention of guests to where you want. With all-over lighting, though, you leave the room more vulnerable to people’s criticism. The right lighting can help to accentuate features whilst hiding issues with the room itself. For that reason, it is a very useful asset.
When you point lighting in the right areas, you can make it easier for specific features in the room to become a primary focal point. You can also help to create a specific mood that helps to give the room the kind of feeling and purpose that you were hoping for. Is this easy? No. Is it possible? Absolutely.
Light Offers Balance And Focus
One of the hardest parts of interior design is ensuring people's vision is drawn to where you want. You want the focus to be where the room is most impressive from a visual perspective. By using light properly, you can help ensure that anyone walking into the room feels an immediate sense of focus. Out of every aspect you might consider when setting up the look of your room, do not dismiss the importance of quality lighting.
Lighting also does a good job of helping to make a space look bigger or smaller. The right lighting in a more intimate setting can create cosy spots – perfect for romantic evenings and more low-key settings. For those who want to help create that kind of ‘welcome to the party’ theme, though, extra lighting can help to make the place look larger and thus more spacious and welcoming.
Light is there to help you accentuate and achieve what you had already intended with this room. Good lighting can be the difference between a space feeling rather general purpose and bland or feeling extensive and specific.
For example, let us say you have a piece of artwork on the wall. Having some downlight will help to accentuate eyes on the artwork whilst creating a sense of darkness around the painting. This creates a sense of focus in the room that was not present beforehand.
Lighting Can Illuminate Key Features
Another key part of using lighting in interior design is helping to draw the focus and eye of the room to a specific area. For example, do you have a feature wall while the other walls are somewhat bland or basic? Then make sure that lighting helps to mask the other walls while illuminating the feature wall.
Light is quite comfortably one of the most important features that we can use to help shepherd our audience's attention to a specific feature. The same goes for functionality, too. If you have an armchair that you read in, then naturally, you want that to feel somewhat illuminated whilst still being cosy so that you can escape into your reading.
Proper lighting around that armchair could help to dim the areas around the chair whilst leaving a spotlight effect on the armchair. This ensures your reading is easy and accessible while the mood feels perfect for a spot of calm, condensed reading.
Do Not Rely Only On Daylight
For many of us, our rooms look spectacular in the brightness of day but rather muted in the dullness of night. That is a challenging issue that you need to try and resolve. For example, if you feel like one of your rooms loses its character when the day fades, you should install some artificial lighting that can add that kind of daylight-inspired positivity back into the room.
Artificial lighting is useful for adding brightness where darkness usually roams. For example, shelving units can become dark and dull – installing some basic LED lighting into these small crevices, though, can keep them bright day and night.
It would help if you did not rely upon daylight to be the sole source of lighting, though. This can often leave you a room that feels open and endearing during the day but closed-off and unwelcoming at night. At the same time, remember that even daylight is not consistent: the daylight you get on a beautiful July morning is different to the grey-sky dullness you get in the middle of November!
Decorative Lighting Can Set The Tone
One of the most important aspects of lighting within interior design is to use it as part of decorative lighting. Decorative lighting is often used to help accentuate what your primary architectural lighting provides. For example, the ‘main’ light in a room might leave the central area brightened but the edges of the room in relative darkness.
Turning to some decorative lighting means you can turn this on when you need to see in those darker areas of the room. This could be something as simple as a stylish lamp in the dark or some LED lights to help illuminate the room enough that you can see the TV or read your book.
Experiment With Lighting: It Can Be Game-Changing
The role of lighting in interior design is not something that you should dismiss lightly. Think about the rooms in your home that benefit from being bright and welcoming all-day – your sitting room, your kitchen etc. – and then think of rooms that require more studious privacy, such as bedrooms and studies.
Experiment with different kinds of lighting. Use available natural lighting, such as daylight, when you can. Do not, though, rely on this alone. The use of decorative lighting can help to set the mood and tone, as well as improve the functionality of each room.
In the end, lighting is a key part of interior design: using it to your advantage is the challenge.