Lighting Designs To Illuminate Your Home

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Lighting Designs To Illuminate Your Home

Lighting is one of the most essential elements of your home, and yet most people don’t know how to determine which lighting to choose. Compared to other elements in your home, lamps and light fixtures are relatively inexpensive, but they’re also integral to the feel and mood of your home. The type of lighting you choose can mean the difference between feeling bright, open and welcome, to feeling cold, dark and shadowy.

You’ll notice that some rooms require light fixtures and lamps to cover every inch with light. Some rooms need to be illuminated in concentrated areas. Sometimes a lamp should blend seamlessly with your decor, and other times they should contrast the colors and angles of the room. Here are some tips to choosing lighting for the main rooms in your home.

How To Choose Lighting For The Main Rooms In Your Home:

Dining Room
This is one of the most important rooms in your home. It’s where you eat, reconnect with your family, plus celebrate milestones, birthdays and holidays. Most dining rooms come with a hanging light or a chandelier. If that light fixture or chandelier is old, you can try to restore it and modernize it to fit your style. But unless you are an electrician, it’s often best to replace old, outdated fixtures.  A dining room light fixture should blend with the colors and design of the room.

Adding an accent lamp or specifically a buffet lamp to your buffet can be a wonderful way to add soft light to draw the eye to a conversation piece, like an antique serving dish or a restored silver platter. This 710 server buffet by Homelegance is an excellent example of how lighting can accent a buffet and your whole dining room.

This server buffet is coupled with the 710 Trestle Formal Dining Set By Homelegance, a stunning capiz shell chandelier and a set of two Ashley Joaquin Clear/Silver Finish Crystal Table Lamps. Even though this room is very formal, the crystal and capiz shell reflect the abundance of warm, inviting light in this room.

To warm up even the most formal space, use a combination of warm LED bulbs and reflective surfaces, like capiz shell and silver, in your dining room lighting. The warm bulb will allow you to see people in a glow-like light, which brings out the best in your room’s features and your guest’s features. Make sure none of the lights are positioned to shine directly into someone’s eyes, this makes for an awkward dining experience.

Expert Tip
You can also store a few extra matching lamps, that can be used when the buffet is in use as a, well, buffet. The added extra light makes it easier to see what’s being served and it draws your guests to the food first, and then to the dining room table.

Living Room Or Family Room
This is the second most communal room in your home. As a family, you spend the most time in the living room and the dining room, so both rooms should be tranquil, inviting, but well-lit. If your family room or living room does not have a light fixture in the ceiling, you can fill in that space with pendant lights. Pendant lights, like the Ashley Signature Design Cade Antique Bronze Finish Metal Pendant Light below, offer a flexible, main source of light that you can customize to your style. They can be installed or hung with hooks for a more rustic feel.

This Benchcraft Gilman Living Room Group uses pendant lights, table lamps and reflective surfaces to make the most of the natural light in this room.

These reflective silver table lamps act as filler lights to brighten up dark areas and corners, making your living room look bigger and more inviting. Accent lighting can also be added to highlight certain areas and to brighten up dark spots. They can either match the room or contrast it in creative ways. Notice the table lamps, the centerpiece and the table are reflective, this contrasts with the bronze pendant light and bronze accents.

Sconces can be purchased to blend seamlessly with your living room, or spotlights can be mounted or set into the drywall. A living room should also use warm light, because it softens faces, colors and textures to create a more open feel. If you can’t find warm bulbs for your spotlights, pair them with warm accents lights to soften the crispness of the cool light.

Place the lamps to radiate light throughout the room, highlighting family photos, artwork and conversation pieces. You want the light to coax you in, not shine too bright to fully enjoy the space.

Bathroom
Bathrooms are tricky. Let’s face it, we’re most vulnerable in a bathroom. The kindest thing to do is use warm light so we look out best in the mirror. But we do need areas with cooler, clinical light, too. As we mentioned earlier, warm light makes us look more like our best selves. Cool light, on the other hand creates shadows and accents creases that we may not want to see.

Have you ever noticed that you look so fabulous (as you should!) in some mirrors, and terrible in others? It’s cool and warm light. Fluorescent light is the worst “cool light” offender for creating an unflattering visage, fortunately more efficient LED bulbs are replacing more and more fluorescent bulbs.

Your bathroom mirror should always be accented and highlighted with warm light. Even if you have a fluorescent light fixture, the light that shows your reflection should be warm. Make sure to have one warm floor lamp or sconce, especially in darker corners of your bathroom. You want it to pick up any water on the floor (kids and spouses, we’re talking to you) so someone doesn’t slip. You should also have a telescoping or adjustable bathroom light that uses a cool bulb. Especially if you’re parents, you will need to clean out scraped knees, pull out splinters, take hair out of eyes and pull out loose teeth in your bathroom. You’ll need a cool, bright light that helps you to see “your patient” more clearly.

Bedroom
A bedroom should be a sanctuary, so you want to make sure your lighting reflects that. Mix bedside lamps with smaller accent lamps throughout the room. Your lamps can have a consistent feel or they can be eclectic. These Ashley Signature Design Ruth Metal Table lamps match the bronzes and browns in the room, but contrast some of the more angular pieces, like the wall art.

This Ashley Signature Design Allymore Queen Bedroom Group utilizes the natural light by hanging a mirror in between the already warm glow of the east-facing windows. The lamps catch the warm easterly glow, as well as light up the darker corners on either side of the bed.

If your bedroom has limited natural light, use a combination of table lamps, sconces, pendant lights and mirrors to maximize on the existing light and brighten up your space.

One thing to always consider is the sense of unity in your bedroom. In the bedroom above, the lamps are the same style and they’re all bronze. But you can mix and match, as long as there’s a unifying element. For example, your lamps can be different colors, but they’ll fit if they’re all rounded. Make sure the color either accents, highlights or blends with the color palate of your room.

Illuminate Your Home At Value City NJ
Value City NJ Furniture & Mattress is New Jersey’s premier lighting and home furniture retailer.  We understand how important lighting is to the mood and feel of your home. We offer a wide variety of lamps, mirrors and accents to brighten any space in your home.

Contact us for more information on how Value City NJ can help illuminate any space in your home.

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