The Importance Of Different Lighting Levels Around Your Home

Light is one of the most important factors in a home – and easily one of the most overlooked. Whether you’ve moved into a new rental property or have finally exchanged contracts on a new first home, your approach to light is the single most impactful consideration for comfort, practicality and straight-up liveability.

Your first thought might be ‘what about furniture, or décor?’. The fact is, though, that you’ve already thought about that. Your belongings already tell a story about your design choices and ideal home aesthetics, and any that don’t will easily be replaced. Light, though, contextualises everything. Here’s how to manage it properly around your home.

Ambience

Lighting can be categorised in a number of different ways – the first of which we’ll be tackling is ambient lighting. Ambient lighting is as it sounds, providing soft background lighting to a space. Overhead lighting floods a room; ambient lighting bathes it.

Ambient lighting is perfect for movie nights, romantic dinners, or winding down after a long day; it creates a warm and inviting atmosphere for relaxation and socialising, and avoids bringing too much attention to your space writ large. Your average lamp enthusiast is a major proponent of ambient lighting, using various lamps and wall sconces to bring soft lighting into a space without having it bear down on you.

Task Lighting

Task lighting is a more utilitarian form of lighting, though it can also do its part to elevate the ambiance in a space. As it says on the tin, task lighting is useful for targeting specific areas or activities.

An angle-poise lamp on your office desk is a task light, that can be manoeuvred to illuminate whatever it is you’re working in; your illuminated bathroom mirrors are task lights, ring-lighting your face for shadowless ease-of-viewing to whatever you’re doing as part of your morning or evening routine. Even kitchen downlighting, as installed on the underside of cabinets, is crucial for seeing what you’re doing in an otherwise-vibey kitchen.

Highlights

Though there are some commonalities, highlighting and task lighting are two different approaches entirely. The latter gives you practical illumination over a subject of your active attention, while the former enables you to passively draw attention to certain features in your home, adding depth and interest to your décor in the process.

Track lights or adjustable spotlights can be used to highlight and accentuate any artwork of which you’re particularly proud, as well as architectural elements which deserve their own figurative flowers. Spotlighting these creates focal points for you and your guests, adding dimensionality and, I hope, banishing the overhead light from your visual vocabulary once and for all.

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