Natural light is best for conservation and hard to beat for light quality, which is why our home has plenty of it. Artificial light is more than a necessary evil, however. It can be used to define space, and the fixtures can be beautiful details.
At the broadest level, light can be used to emphasize the social and functional structure of a home. Light should define how a space is used. Light should be usable.
So often, lighting is just an afterthought. Many spec homes have terrible lighting layout. The single ceiling light in the middle of the room comes to mind immediately. Lights are thrown in haphazardly without thought to how the rooms will be used or whether the light is sufficient. Or, perhaps, the builder does not want to dictate how the room will be used by some unknown future owner, so the light fixtures are added in a way that does not work well for anyone. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rooms with the best lighting design in standard spec homes are those that are the most specialized — kitchens, bathrooms, and dining rooms.
But how do you get good lighting? If we were to take a page from stores and office buildings, the answer would seem to be a large amount of uniform lighting. To some degree, this is a better alternative, but this approach increases functionality by making the space sterile.
Good lighting design must start with how a space will be used and work to support that usage.
Tapestry of Light and Dark (135)
- Problem: In a building with uniform light level, there are few “places” which function as effective settings for human events. This happens because, to a large extent, the places which make effective settings are defined by light.
- Therefore: Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.
- In our home: Light is used to emphasize the main navigational points of our home. Some key examples are:
Guiding lights in the entry 
Guiding lights on the stairs People also orient themselves toward the light and away from the darkness. This tendency can be used to define the social spaces in a home which we’ll explore more in…
Pools of Light (252)
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| Dining room pendant |
- Problem: Uniform illumination — the sweetheart of the lighting engineers — serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space, and makes people feel disoriented and unbounded.
- Therefore: Place the lights low, and apart, to form individual pools of light which encompass chairs and tables like bubbles to reinforce the social character of the spaces which they form. Remember that you can’t have pools of light without the dark places in between.
- In our home: It’s important to realize that this pattern doesn’t mean that there should be full darkness between more brightly lit spots — although having darkness as an option provides some interesting opportunities. Our home has a generous amount of ambient lighting.
Living room pendant But light should define boundaries. It should concentrate attention. And we should make sure that light defines the space in a way that is consistent with how people use it. If a brightly lit area does not correspond to a social or functional space, it will be confusing and less effective than if the light is designed around how the space will be used.
Pools of light may be social or they may be used to provide task lighting. We have both in our home. We have task lighting in the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the dressing room. In the dining room and living room, the pendants define social spaces. These are not the only lights that support this pattern, but they are some of the key ones.
Filtered Light (238)
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| Filtered light in the powder room |
- Problem: Light filtered through leaves, or tracery, is wonderful. But why? … Direct light coming from a point source casts strong shadows, resulting in harsh images with strong contrasts. … These contrasts and hard boundaries are unpleasant — objects appear to have a hard character, and our eyes, unable to adjust to the contrast, cannot pick up the details.
- Therefore: For all these reasons, we have a natural desire to diffuse light with lamp shades or indirect lighting, so that the images created by the light will be “softer,” that is, that the boundaries perceived are not sharp, there is less contrast, fewer shadows, and the details are easier to see.
- In our home: (I cheated a little with the problem statement and therefore. This pattern is primarily about light filtered through windows, but I chose some key points about general light diffusion.)One of the main ways we keep light diffuse is by having a large number of lights to provide ambient lighting. This provides a general background level of light which the pools of light shape further. The light fixtures themselves also have shades to diffuse light.
Warm Colors (250)
- Problem: The greens and greys of hospitals and office corridors are depressing and cold. Natural wood, sunlight, bright colors are warm. In some ways, the warmth of the colors in a room makes a great deal of difference between comfort and discomfort.
- Therefore: Choose surface colors which, together with the color of the natural light, reflected light, and artificial lights, create a warm light in the rooms.
- In our home: This pattern does not say that every surface in the house must be between red and yellow. This is a good thing, since we have a rather large teal wall in our home. However, the overall quality of the light should be warm.We accomplish this partly through the materials we use — that teal wall is next to a warm floor in white oak. We also accomplish this through warm light. LED lights were a particular concern here since they often give off light that is cooler than that from incandescent bulbs. We went with EcoSmart LED lights in soft white. They give a warm light quality, very similar to incandescent lights.
In the next two posts, we’ll go over the details of our lighting design and then spend some time discussing the light fixtures we chose.