5 Ways to Create a Truly Unique Atmosphere with Home Lighting

When you really start to look at the interior of most homes, you begin to quickly notice how bland they all are. They’re all white walls and unremarkable furniture with maybe the occasional well-placed piece of bedding to make things look welcoming.

Then you get home and realize that your interior doesn’t look much better. Suddenly it’s an emergency: How do you make your home look striking, welcoming, and unique?

The answer is lighting. Lighting can be utterly transportive. In art and film, lighting is used as the primary means of informing a viewer of where the subject is. A warm orange light can show them in the welcoming embrace of their home. A cold blue light shows them in dentist’s office.

Here are 5 ways to make it so that when people enter your home, they are truly transported.

1.  Know Your Colors

Color theory is a complex field, but it does have some easy-to-understand fundamentals. Red light is alarming, while orange and yellow light is warm and relaxing.

There’s no law saying you can’t decorate your living room with red, overhead spotlights. It’ll look like a supervillain layer, but you know what? It will look unique.

Deciding what color light to use starts with acknowledging what color things are already there. You might not have the plain white walls joked about earlier. If your walls are painted blue, then under certain lights they will become a color you might not want.

The general rule of thumb is that “living spaces” like living rooms and bedrooms should be lit with warm colors, while “working spaces” like home offices can be cooler colors.

The reason is that warm colors blend better with the colors that are usually already in living spaces: White walls, cowhide pillows, that sort of thing.

2.  Know Your Directions

Some people can tolerate overhead lighting, but for a majority of people it can make the most welcoming space feel like a doctor’s office.

When you’re lighting your home, you have to remember to mix it up. A little overhead lighting can be fine, but only overhead lighting is an issue.

This is because of the way overhead lighting creates shadows. Any light will create shadows opposite of itself, and overhead lighting creates unflattering shadows pointed straight down.

Sideways-pointed shadows are the most “neutral feeling” shadows you can create. This means you want your lights to be eye-level and facing a little sideways.

Note, however, that if your lights are at eye-level, then they are going to go right into you and your guests’ eyes. This is why you should tilt the lights slightly down if you can or use a shade.

3.  Know Your Diffusion

Speaking of shades, you might be interested to know that there is science behind that as well. See, whenever a light hits a material, it does one of two things: Bounce off of it, or pass through.

Certain materials will “diffuse” the light as it bounces off or goes through it. Diffused light is far softer on the eyes. Imagine the difference between the sun, and the sun when you have sunglasses on. It’s almost literally a difference of night and day!

You can light an entire room with exclusively diffused light if you so desire. In some cases, this is preferable. Unfiltered, undiffused light is harsh, almost hot, to be under.

It’s natural to think you have to point your lights towards the room itself, but experiment with pointing your lights at walls and using shades on lights that don’t normally have them.

This can make your rooms feel much easier to relax in, as well as giving you more control over the general intensity of the light in your room.

4.  Know Your Fixtures

Everything discussed so far has had to do with the lights themselves: What color they are, what direction you point them, and how to diffuse them. But none of that matters if you have nowhere to actually hang the lights.

Now you might point out that most lights come with their own fixtures. Namely, they come on stands, whether they’re as tall as a person, or little Pixar desk lamps.

But not all lights come with these and restricting yourself to those will hold you back from creating something really unique. Consider string lights: Mono-colored string lights can be small, but bright, speckling an upper wall with an enchanting, star-field glow.

You aren’t going to find any string lights that come with their own fixtures. In that case, you would have to nail the lights to the ceiling yourself.

Knowing your fixtures also means combining fixtures. And, this cannot be overstated, combining fixtures means knowing your fixtures.

What this means is that you can set a desk lamp on a strategically placed shelf, but you must be certain the shelf can support the weight of the lamp.

5.  Know Your Limits

This leads to the last thing to keep in mind: You cannot always, immediately get the lighting set-up you want for the room in which you want it.

If you can’t climb a ladder, you can’t hang string lights up near your ceiling. If you don’t have the materials for a shelf, you can’t have a strategically placed desk lamp. If you can’t afford the lamp you want, don’t take out a loan for it even if it will tie the whole room together.

While this might seem obvious but imagine this: You see in a magazine a room lighting layout that just speaks to you. The complication? It costs thousands of dollars.

The thing Is, limits do not mean that you are forever disallowed from doing something. Limits just mean that you have to carefully consider how you are going to do something.

A spending limit is a spending limit. It is not a creativity limit. And it is completely possible that you can do that setup on a perfectly reasonable budget.