J'Adore Home: Lighting your Home

In our work, we are accustomed to offering options, options and more options for our clients. Whether its furniture, paint colours, accents or lighting, options are always good.
In our presentations, lighting has always been my weakness. Choosing the best of three lighting choices is like asking me to choose between chocolate or cake. In other words, impossible!
I get excited about light fixtures, the way hockey fans get giddy about the playoffs.

Because of the multitude of lighting options available to our clients at all different price points, I have developed a standardized method of narrowing down the options.

I use three key points when looking for lighting options for our clients.

1. What is the feel of the room?

In our initial meetings with our clients, we work to identify their design inspirations and preferences. Once I have some specific direction of the design styles choices that are most appealing to our clients, our design renderings can be presented. While shopping for design choices for the materials presentation, we look at this design style. For example, if a client wants rustic elegance, we may choose a more elegant lighting option with rustic elements for the ceiling.

See this example below courtesy of Beth Bryan at the Unskinny Boppy.

Check out her awesome article at http://unskinnyboppy.com/2015/05/five-home-decorating-trends-from-the-2015-parade-of-homes/. 

While for another home, we may choose a more rustic option but juxtapose with more elegant room features such as the picture below:

Image via: http://www.lushome.com/22-modern-kitchens-dining-room-designs-enhanced-exposed-brick-wall-ceiling/109630

 Both rooms are stunning but it really comes down to personal choice and preference. In our case, we propose multiple options and remain flexible to ensure that the client is happy with their choice. 


2. How do you use the room?

The second criteria we often consider when choosing lighting options is to consider how we are using the room. For example, in a kitchen we need functional lighting and ambient lighting for style and appeal. More frequently, we find presenting multiple types of lighting for one room is the ideal lighting scenario. As home designs focus more on open concept living and rooms become multipurpose, it is natural that designing interiors should follow with multipurpose lighting plans.

The kitchen below has an ideal lighting plan. Downlights for the functional day to day use of the kitchen for cooking, baking and preparation and the pendants are there as ambient lighting and statements.

Image via: http://photos.hgtv.com/photo/tone_on_tone-transitional-kitchen

This article over at Better Homes and Garden is a good resource for anyone planning their own lighting plans.
 http://www.bhg.com/decorating/lessons/basics/how-to-light-any-room/#page=10

3. Look at the budget

Finally, we often set a budget for the lighting plan in a room. Depending on the budget of the room, we have an upper limit for lighting plans and a lower limit. This is an important aspect of budgets. For us, integrity is an important value. So we treat our budgets as hard limits. I know our clients appreciate that. If our lighting plan is closer to the upper limit, we often balance out these choices with other less expensive options for accents, or if the lighting plan is closer to the lower limit, we have more to play with for other pieces.

In these cases, mixing high-low pieces and taking the time to source pieces makes the rooms we design feel more curated rather than the out of the box design.

Wishing you  a light filled day!
Ameera