Home Lighting Design Tips And Ideas
By: Thad Pickering

Using the correct lighting fixtures and bulbs throughout your home is a skill that can help you enjoy the time spent at home even more. That's because home lighting can be useful for two intended purposes, the first being function, and the second being mood.

With that in mind, consider each room in your home and what it is mainly used for. What are the activities that often go on in that room? How much light will be usually needed for those activities? Are there any points of interest in the room that you would really like to draw attention to?

Asking these questions can help you lay out your home lighting design so that it fits both form and function. Most lighting fixtures that you choose for your design will most likely fall into one of three categories, general lighting, task lighting, and accent lighting. Let's discuss each of these in greater detail.

General lighting is perhaps the kind of lighting that most people are familiar with. It's very simply the most prominent lighting source in the room, very often an overhead fixture. As its name implies, it provides a general, overall source of light for the entire room. These general type of lighting fixtures can be very simple or very ornate, but their first and foremost job is to provide sufficient lighting for the occupants of the room to be able to move around safely.

The next type of home lighting that we want to consider is called task lighting, and this is an area where many home lighting designs are found to be insufficient. The purpose of task lighting is to help illuminate a specific area for a certain kind of task that will be performed there. For instance, if there is a reading area in a room, it would be very appropriate to have either a floor lamp or a table lamp positioned very close to the seating arrangement with the correct bulb wattage to ensure that a person will be able to read comfortably not only for a few minutes, but even for a prolonged period of time.

Once again, this is where many home lighting designs fall short. Quite often, many folks expect a general lighting fixture for each room to be sufficient for the tasks that are performed there. But this is not always the case, especially with activities that call for focused reading over a period of time, or specialized tasks performed in the kitchen. So the proper use of task lighting can improve your enjoyment and effectiveness of tasks and activities performed at home.

Finally, consider also accent lighting. This kind of lighting fixture is not meant to provide illumination for activities in a specific room, as much as it is meant to focus attention on a particular feature or area of the room that you wish to highlight or set a mood for. A good example of accent lighting is when lights are focused on a painting on a wall. These lights don't really contribute that much to the overall light level of the room, but they do bring attention to the painting instead, which is what they are designed to do.

There is an almost endless array of lighting fixtures that can be used for all three kinds of lighting, whether it be general, task, or accent lighting. But try to think ahead and plan out each room in your home so that you can use each kind of lighting fixture to its maximum potential.