This post will get down to the nitty gritty details of lighting design. It’s a complement to the general electrical design we covered in an earlier post.
Lighting design is complex — it is one of the areas where we had the most dependency on our build team for input. There are many issues to balance: ambient lighting competes with the desire to use light to define spaces, legal requirements compete with aesthetic desires, and the need to make decisions early competes with lack of available knowledge of how the space will look with drywall, paint, furniture, etc.
Overview
Yuval and Brent put together a general lighting plan, and we worked with them and our electrician to refine the plan. Although we had a lot of say in the specific fixtures we chose, we mainly followed the lighting plan given by them.
We have a lot of lights in our home. To give an idea, let’s compare the three homes we will have lived in in 2012:
| Home | Built in lights | Area (sq ft) | Lights per 100 sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kirkland town home | 25 | 1600 | 1.6 |
| Bellevue town home | 12 | 1200 | 1.0 |
| New house | 100 | 2700 | 3.7 |
Our new home has over twice the built in light density of other homes. Plus, unlike those houses, where the lighting was placed haphazardly, our new home has lights placed thoughtfully so that they both work well and look good.
Main floor electrical plan
On the main floor, we use can lights for for general illumination. They are also used to highlight some specific features such as the dining room wall (for art), the fireplace, and the kitchen island. Pendants in the dining room, living room, and stairwell will be used to provide focus and as aesthetic elements in their own right.
The detailed electrical plan for the main floor is below. You’ll have to click through if you want to see any detail.
Lower floor electrical plan
The circulation areas on the lower floor use can lights. In the media room, we wanted to avoid penetrations that would interfere with soundproofing. Wall sconces provide general, low level illumination in the media room. Track lights provide bright lighting over the equipment closet and over the seating area.
Upstairs electrical plan
We relied heavily on sconces and track lights upstairs to avoid ceiling penetrations — here for heat efficiency rather than sound proofing. The few can lights used are 4″ fixtures which are smaller than the standard 6″ cans. The bathrooms use these lights to provide good, waterproof illumination, especially over the shower or tub. The bedrooms use track lights for general illumination; the landing uses wall sconces.
Switches
Placing switches is hard when there are 100 lights. The control we want — fine light groupings, three-way switches (which, confusingly, only have two switches controlling the same light) — requires more switches. But more switches make the lights harder to use. The switches also need to be usefully located.
While there are some rules of thumb to switch placement — e.g., no more than three switches per bank, three-way switches both ends of passage ways — many of the detailed decisions were based on advice from our electrician combined with imagining how we would live in the house.
Overall, our switches ended up fairly logical. Switches ended up in places that make sense when you want to use them — at entries and exits to spaces, on accessible walls, etc. We’ve been using them some as the house works toward completion, and we are slowly learning which ones are which.
Once the design is done, the next step is choosing the specific fixtures to be installed. This will be covered in the next post.