Lighting is key to ensuring that your room looks its very best. The right lighting can enhance your furniture and showcase the best of it, while the wrong lighting can leave your room feeling sickly and dimmed out. In addition, lighting spaces where you plan to work or spend time with guests brightly can help energize you – but a bedroom with lights that are too bright can keep you up all night. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to choose well.
The most important thing to focus on is lamp style. Ceiling lamps, wall lamps, table lamps, and floor lamps all present your room in different ways, and combining them can be the best way to get the effect you want.
Ceiling lights tend to provide even coverage, illuminating all of your furniture equally well. Ceiling lights of some form are often the best basis for a room’s lighting, and using dimmer bulbs in the ceiling lighting can allow you to highlight other spots with different styles of lamps. Of course, there are unique examples that are focal points on their own – most notably, chandeliers. The main point of a chandelier or other more elaborate hanging light is to illuminate and draw attention to itself, rather than the more general lighting of ceiling lamps.
Floor and wall lamps serve similar purposes – illuminating particular spaces and providing ambiance without brightening the room overall too much. Wall sconces and lamps tend to provide ambiance first and foremost, and can be placed evenly to give a room a slight warm glow. Floor lamps can be used for brightening a particular space, designating the most important parts of a room, and of course they make great reading solutions.
Table lamps, in addition to being great decorative pieces for your desk, coffee table, or nightstand, are great ways to make work easier on yourself. A small table lamp can provide plenty of light for finishing off your project. In addition, table lamps are a great choice for nighttime reading – because they aren’t too bright, they provide enough light to read by without interfering with your body’s natural sleep schedule.
Beyond the above basics, it all comes down to what works best for your home and for your room. Warmer-toned but dimmer lighting can be great for a bedroom, while you might want plenty of lamps to both decorate and illuminate your living room. Find what works best for your space, and light up the night!