Interior Lighting Design – How to Light Your Home

Interior Lighting Design – How to Light Your Home

Lighting fills a home with life. Interior design and lighting, when married well, work to enhance every aspect of your home. In addition to massively impacting aesthetics and functionality, lighting can profoundly affect your mood, emotions, and well-being—and everyone else in your home. Ask any interior designer, and they’ll tell you a home isn’t complete without the right mix of lighting.

That mix is achieved by particularly choosing the right lights for your design (of which there are all sorts of fixtures to choose from for all sorts of purposes).

Just look at this lineup alone: there are pendants, lamps, wall lights, floor lights, downlights, up lights, hidden lights, feature lights, AND integrated architectural lights—all fine examples of available options for you to play with when designing.

Learning how to light your home is an exciting project that adds depth, dimension, and dramatic flair—all while utilizing your space’s unique character and personality.

Now that you have a sense of the relationship between interior design and lighting, we want to give you a guide on how to effectively light your home. Here’s a few of our favorite tips for effectively lighting your house.

Why Is Lighting Important In Interior Design?

Just like the time homeowners spend picking the perfect furniture and displays for their space and tastes, spending ample time finding the right lighting for your interior is a worthwhile investment.

Lighting is essential for executing the vision you have for your home by giving it more character, while enhancing ambience, mood, and atmosphere.

When we walk into rooms, our eyes are always drawn toward the brightest parts of the space. Using the right lighting can pull eyes to the places and particulars you want to highlight. And by choosing specific lighting that works for a certain space, you can develop the desired feeling you want, whether it’s making a room cozy and inviting, adding height, or transmitting warm and sweet tranquillity.

Mood is everything, so asking yourself what you want a space to feel like gives you a direction to seek to achieve that desired feel. This process invites all sorts of creative ideas for finding the right feel, with each room posing its own unique opportunity for experimentation.

For example, for anything in your home you’d like to draw attention toward—say a piece of art that you proudly display—having the right lighting, such as a downlight, directs your focus to the art itself while collaborating with the soft shadows surrounding the piece. Simple installations like this can make all the difference in highlighting the details and adding depth and dimension to your home.

What Are the Main Factors to Consider in Interior Lighting Design?

Room size

When designing, a room can be an exploratory playground in figuring out what works best for the space you’re working with. Smaller, more enclosed spaces call for different lighting versus larger rooms, which have more room for shadows and more space to light.

Layering in lighting across a room will vary on the space you have to work with, so picking lighting that complements the size of the room is important. Overall, more space means more factors to consider when you’re designing—in larger rooms, you’ll need more light to brighten up the whole area. Larger spaces often have more decorations and furniture, so more lighting will be needed to complement those pieces.

Style Preference

Everyone has their own style, so we encourage exploring different types of lighting and fixtures that fit your vision.

For example, if you like a more vintage look, our LED Vintage Style bulbs add dimmable, energy efficient, long-lasting charm to any space.

Our range of smart bulbs offer full color customization and adaptability fit any style you’re striving for.

Amount of Natural Light

Factoring in your natural environment is an important consideration to make—grey afternoon in Seattle is quite different from a sunny morning in Miami. When designing your lighting, considering where natural light hits your house throughout the day can inform your choices and help you synthesize your home to the sun’s schedule.

Furnishings

Furnishings provide elements of personalization that make your home uniquely you, showing off your style through your picks. Your lighting can combine with and complement your furnishings to create a collaboration throughout the whole room, enhancing the enjoyment of your furniture even more by sharing its colors or highlighting the details of the decorations that speak to your character and taste.

Home Lighting Ideas by Room

Kitchens

The kitchen is one of the most exciting parts of a home to design—so let’s start cooking up ideas for how to light it.

A kitchen is the central gathering point of a house, so getting the lighting just right gives you the opportunity to make your culinary spot collaborative, fun, and cozy. Making the lighting inviting for your family and guests so that they can participate in cooking some lovely food is a fantastic starting point for transforming your home’s heart.

With cabinet space, putting LED Strip Lights underneath or on top of cabinets can make your countertop bright for food prep or light up the higher parts of your kitchen like the ceiling, which adds depth and height, brightening up the loftier parts while giving a glow to its edges. Check out our guide for installing LED strip lights.

If you have a kitchen island, we’ve got some ideas to light it up! Peel and stick LED strip lights bring some lovely color into cooking and conversation. And if you’re looking for a timeless style, combine decorative light bulbs or vintage light bulbs with our hanging Pendant Light Fixtures for an elegant solution.

Bedrooms

Dimmable, relaxed, sun-up and sun-down lighting for easing into both morning and night are bedroom essentials.

The brain’s ability to know when it’s time to sleep starts with the light we see. In the evening, melatonin production begins naturally and peaks at night, making us drowsy and prepared to sleep. According to research, when our eyes see bright lights between 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., our brain’s ability to produce melatonin is impaired, and our natural sleep patterns are affected as a result.

So at night, you’ll want dimmable lighting that feels like firelight to help your brain know it’s time to catch some z’s. A warm, orange, ember-like light will go a long way in helping you unwind and ease into sleep. Our dimmable relax™ HD LED bulbs do an excellent job of creating a cozy atmosphere to cuddle into.

Dimmable lighting is a bedroom’s best friend, because waking up well is just as important as sleeping well. So in the morning, you’ll want as much light as you can to signal your brain to wake and get going with your day.

Home Offices

Working in a bright, well-lit space helps in focusing on the task at hand. Considering how much of our lives we spend working, especially with many folks working hybrid schedules, it’s important that our setup is satisfying, conducive to our styles, and sustains our focus. That’s why we offer a range of smart bulbs to energize, refresh, and elevate your workspace. Creating any atmosphere that boosts your productivity is just a touch away.

If you use white noise, incorporate meditation into your day, or just want some background sounds, Bluetooth lights with speakers can be placed in an office desk lamp or a standalone fixture.

Living Rooms

From gametime to movie night, to board game battles or just everyday chilling, living rooms are a home’s hub and need to have lighting that adapts to whatever occasion or mood is called for. We’ve got a few ideas that’ll make your living room ready for anything.

With versatile LED Strip Lights, you can decorate behind your television, your mantle, or underneath your tables to customize the colors of your hangout however you’d like.

Or if you’re looking to smarten up your home with lighting control at your fingertips, our line of LED smart bulbs is fully customizable in the CYNC smart home app.

Dining Spaces

In a dining space, the dining table is front and center. Our dimmable and long-lasting LED Decorative Light Bulbs are perfect for over-the-table lighting and for brightening up your dining atmosphere. Plus, they highlight whatever food you’ve brought to the table—and you know what they say: “You eat with your eyes first.”

We hope you’ve been inspired by our home lighting ideas. Now that we’ve journeyed through ways to light your living space, we want to see how your home’s lighting turns out! Tag us on social media @gelighting with the hashtag #LifeinCync for a chance to be featured. Happy home lighting!