Lighting Design for the Home: The Fundamentals Beyond the Catalogue

What lighting design for the home achieves

Lighting design is the conscious decision about how light is distributed in a room. It begins not with the question of luminaires but with the question of situations: where do people cook, eat, read, work, sleep? At what time of day? Alone or in company?

From these situations come requirements for brightness, direction, colour temperature and control. Only at the end comes the choice of luminaires. Anyone who reverses this order buys beautiful luminaires that hang in the wrong place. An example is described in the article on luminaires in lighting design.

Good lighting design is not a luxury for big houses. In small apartments especially, light decides whether a room feels cramped or generous.

Light does not make rooms bright. It makes them legible.

What a single ceiling light costs. Every evening in flat light is an evening in a room that gives nothing back. You squint at the chopping board, you wake the whole household at night, and the walls you paid for disappear into the background. Light is also hard to improve later, because cables belong in the wall. So what do the layers look like?

The three lighting layers

Almost every lighting plan works with three layers. They complement one another and should be switchable separately.

General light

The general light provides orientation and an even brightness. It need not be strong, but it should be pleasant. It works best when indirect, that is, reflected off the ceiling or walls. A light strip in a ceiling cove, wall uplighters or flat recessed luminaires can take on this role.

Zone light

Zone light illuminates activities: the worktop in the kitchen, the dining table, the reading chair, the desk, the mirror. It is directed, brighter than the general light and positioned where the activity takes place. We have described it in detail for the kitchen in the article Kitchen lighting in three layers and for the bathroom in the article Bathroom lighting.

Accent light

Accent light sets points of emphasis: a picture, a shelf, a stone wall, a plant. It creates depth because the eye moves between brighter and darker areas. Without accents, a room in the evening quickly feels like a waiting room.

In our example, the problem is that the ceiling light was meant to take on all three layers at once. It is too bright for atmosphere, too weak for the worktop and too central for the reading chair. So how bright, how warm and how true should the light be?

Colour temperature, colour rendering and brightness

Three terms come up in every lighting plan. You do not have to master them in detail, but you should understand what they mean.

Colour temperature shapes the mood. Warm light around 2,700 kelvin recalls incandescent light and feels relaxing in the evening. Cooler light can support concentration in the kitchen or at a workstation. What matters is that all the luminaires in a room are similarly warm.

Colour rendering decides whether wood looks like wood and skin like skin. Cheap lamps with low colour rendering make rooms look pallid even if they are bright enough. We plan with high values, especially in the kitchen, bathroom and dressing room.

Brightness is often overrated. Many rooms are lit too brightly in the evening, and lit wrongly: from above, evenly, without contrast. Better is less light, falling deliberately where it is needed. And where should it fall?

Light the walls rather than the floor

A principle that hardly any lighting catalogue explains: we perceive a room mainly through its vertical surfaces. A room with illuminated walls feels larger and brighter than a room in which the same light falls only on the floor.

This has practical consequences. A wall uplighter on the long side of a living room can achieve more than three additional ceiling spotlights. An illuminated shelf gives a room depth. In Altbau apartments with high ceilings, the ceiling itself can be used as a reflector by letting indirect light shine upwards from a cornice or the top edge of a piece of furniture.

In our example we plan indirect light along the bookcase wall in the living room, a floor light beside the reading chair and a table lamp on the sideboard. The ceiling light stays but is hardly ever switched on. Imagine coming home in November: the wall glows, the lamp by the chair is already on, and the room welcomes you before you sit down.

When the walls glow, the room grows. When only the floor glows, it shrinks.

Switching and control: how light is operated

The most beautiful lighting plan fails if it is awkward to operate. That is why we plan the control with the same care as the luminaires.

As a rule: each lighting layer needs its own circuit. Switches belong where you enter a room, and in through-rooms at both ends. Dimmers should suit the luminaires, which is not a given. With several layers, scenes are worthwhile: one press for "cooking", one for "dinner", one for "night".

Whether a simple installation is enough for this or networked control makes sense depends on the scope. What really helps and what merely blinks is described in the article Smart home you do not see. The foundation for everything remains well-considered electrical planning; see Electrical planning: why the socket in front of the sofa is planned first.

One detail the W. family would appreciate: a faint orientation light in the corridor and bathroom that comes on at night via motion sensors. Nobody gets woken any more. Next, the layers meet the rooms.

Light room by room

Every room has its own requirements. A brief overview:

• Hallway: friendly general light, light at the mirror, lighting in the coat area. This is where the first impression on coming home is formed.
• Living room: little ceiling light, more floor, table and wall lights, indirect light for depth, a targeted reading light.
• Kitchen: glare-free task light under the wall cabinets or above the island, warm light above the table, a general light for cleaning.
• Dining room: one or more pendants above the table, dimmable, plus a faint general light.
• Bedroom: warm, subdued light, a reading light at the bed, an orientation light for the night. More on this in the article The bedroom as a place of rest.
• Bathroom: even light from the front or sides of the mirror, a general light, a night light.
• Workplace: glare-free light without reflections in the screen, supplemented by daylight. See Home office in the apartment.

In open-plan layouts, light connects or separates the zones. How this works is described in the article Light as a transition. And before any lamp goes on, there is the light that costs nothing.

Daylight as the starting point

Lighting design really begins by day. Where does the light come from in the morning, where in the afternoon? Which rooms lie in shade? These questions determine when artificial light is needed and what role it plays.

In Viennese Altbau apartments with windows onto the inner courtyard, daylight is often scarce. Here good artificial lighting design can extend the day, for example with bright, indirectly lit walls in the rear parts of the room. How to make better use of the daylight you have is described in the article Making use of daylight. How does all this become a plan?

How a lighting concept comes about

For a renovation or redesign, we proceed in clear steps:

1. Gather situations. Who does what, where and when? Which rooms are used in the evening, which hardly at all?
2. Fix floor plan and furnishing. No furniture plan, no lighting plan, because light belongs to table, sofa and worktop.
3. Define the lighting layers per room. General light, zone light, accents, each with its task and position.
4. Set colour temperature and quality. Uniform values for kelvin and colour rendering.
5. Plan the control. Circuits, switch positions, dimmers, scenes, motion sensors.
6. Choose the luminaires. Recessed lights, profiles, decorative luminaires, matched to room and budget.
7. Hand over the electrical plan. The electrician receives an unambiguous plan with outlets, heights and switching groups.
8. Adjust on site. Alignment, suspension heights, dimming levels and scenes are fine-tuned after installation.

In an Altbau additional questions arise: may holes be drilled into a stucco ceiling? Where do old cables run? How deep is the ceiling construction? We clarify this on site, with specialists where necessary. What an Altbau renovation demands as a whole is described in the article Renovating an Altbau apartment in Vienna.

The cost of lighting design depends on scope and depth of intervention. With an overall concept at Richard Atelier, it is part of the planning service, and one contact person coordinates architect, electrician and our joinery Tischlerkultur, in the Viennese tradition since 1935, from start to finish. The luminaires themselves can cost very different amounts, and it pays to look for quality in the general light and to choose decorative luminaires selectively.