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Lighting Design Basics
Lighting is the icing on the cake for your stylish home. It adds atmosphere and ambiance and allows you to bring attention to (and yes, show off) your proud possessions. Conversely, a poorly lit home is a sure way to give away your lack of style and design sophistication. But good lighting is much more than choosing the right wattage for your floor lamp, it is an art and a science which draws upon common sense as well as high-minded theories.
Home lighting projects provide a great way to add drama and style to your home. You can use lighting arrangements in myriad different ways to highlight, define, and set the mood. Though many lighting arrangements are added when the home is built, there are many home lighting projects that can be easily added to already finished rooms.
Lighting should be planned to complement your lifestyle. So, first you need to develop a home lighting plan that suits your individual needs and those of your family. When planning your lighting, look at the activities that occur in each room, the atmosphere you want to create and the decorative elements you wish to emphasize. Keep in mind that light can be absorbed and even wasted in dark-colored rooms, or reflected and used as additional illumination in light-colored rooms. Also, take note of those areas serving more than a single purpose and those that will require more than one type of lighting. There are three main categories of lighting: general lighting, task lighting and accent lighting.
General lighting is the most familiar and most prominent lighting source in a room; sometimes an overhead light fixture. It provides a general, overall source of light for the entire room. While you can buy some very ornate general lighting fixtures, this is definitely a case of function over form
Task lighting is self-explanatory. This purpose of task lighting is to illuminate a certain area that was design with a specific task in mind. For example, a reading area or office area would need a high-quality reading lights.
Accent Lighting adds drama to a room by creating visual interest. As part of a decorating scheme, it is used to spotlight paintings, houseplants, sculpture, and other prized possessions, or to highlight the texture of a wall, drapery or outdoor landscaping. Accent lighting requires at least three times as much light on the focal point as the general lighting around it. This usually is provided by track, recessed, or wall-mounted fixtures.
One of the biggest things you want to do when approaching a particular space is that you want to think of it in terms of layers. The more layers you have, the mo re flexibility you have in a space to create different moods, different ambience and different functional needs.