By Tim McKoeough
Lighting can have a dramatic effect in the way a room is seen and feels. When designing a home, planning the lighting scheme is “beyond criticism,” said Alex Miller, a partner of the architecture and lighting design firm based in New York Taylor and Miller. “The lighting is something very moving,” he said, which directly changes the way we perceive a space.
“When you enter a restaurant, a house or a hotel room, and you think it is cold or unattractive, it is generally not architecture,” Miller said. “The problem is usually lighting. If lighting were intimate and warm, then its perception of space would be different.”
At the same time, lighting has an important functional role to play when illuminating circulation roads, work areas and decorative objects. In some rooms, having the ability to adjust lighting helps them serve multiple purposes, such as a dining room that functions as a place for the task or a media room that can also be a place for exercise.
Mr. Miller and other architects and designers generally create attractive functional lighting schemes by placing different types of accessories instead of flying a room with a single overwhelming light. Here we show you how to do it as professionals do.
Make a balance of natural light
Any lighting scheme must begin with a consideration of the most important lighting element of all: the sun. In dense cities like New York, “Natural Light is a merchandise that we are always looking for ways to maximize it,” said Tim Bade, a partner of the Brooklyn -based architecture firm, Bade Stageberg Cox. “So how do we complement that with artificial light?”
When the company was designing an apartment in the corner in Manhattan with windows on two sides, for example, they sought to allow natural light to flow through the various areas of being dividing the living room of the dining room with a translucent screen and an office with shelves with glass panels.
It is also worth considering how the color of the light changes throughout the day, from the bright bluish light in the morning to the warm and yellow light late in the afternoon, said Martin Cox, another partner in Bade Stageberg Cox. “In the morning, the Eastern Light is colder,” said Mr. Cox, “and at night, as the sun sets, it gets more heated. Therefore, the mood and the atmosphere change naturally throughout the day,” he said.
Having layers of lamps that can respond to these changes can help a home feel cozy throughout the day.
Start with general lighting
For artificial light, start planning accessories that will provide general lighting delivering light washing in most of the room. In the new houses, this is often a ceiling accessory mounted on the bright flush in the center of a room or a grid of tin lights embedded above. Any of the options will illuminate a room, but neither typically creates a lot of atmosphere.
To do better, designers adopt a wide range of alternatives. Taylor and Miller frequently use hidden accessories to wash the walls and roofs with light. “We are not installing grids of descending light,” said Aoife O’Leary, a firm’s partner. “We are interested in environmental lighting.”
The firm sometimes hides linear accessories inside the coves, above the lining or behind the built -in furniture. Other times, they hide the ordinary bulbs in the plugs behind the personalized metal tones that direct illuminated columns or through the walls.
The interior designer based in New York, David Frazier, often uses pendants with large -scale tones of designers such as Isamu Noguchi or Ingo Maurer as sculptural statements that shine. “They provide this very warm and bad light,” Frazier said.
Divide light into multiple accessories
Another option is to divide the ceiling lights into some decorative pendants. When Dunnam Zerbini Design, based in New York, was designing a media room for a customer in Manhattan, the firm divided the ceiling lights into four pendants with tones wrapped in Paul Marra strings.
“It is a creative aspect that gives you balanced lighting,” said Kelly Zerbini, a firm’s partner. “Sometimes we do this, so there is no central point so clear and definitive.”
Other times, the company chooses to use numerous wall appliques around a room. “That feels very human in a scale and prevents the perimeter of the rooms being these dark areas where nothing happens,” said Zerbini.
Even if you have a lamp in the center of a room, you can choose an accessory that not only exploits a single -font light room. When Mr. Frazier designed the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment, he installed a Serge Mouille accessory with three arms in the center of the ceiling.
“Those arms are positioned, so they are actually illuminating art on the walls,” Frazier said. “When we use superior lighting, we try not to have it radiant, where you feel that you are a French fried under a heat lamp.”
Define functions with light
The next step is to bring light to different functions within the room. In houses with an open plant plane, for example, ceiling lights and hanging lamps can demarcate separate areas.
When the New York -based lighting designer, Staci Ruiz, was working in a house in Brooklyn, used a pair of decorative roof lights to illuminate the island of the kitchen, subcabin lights to illuminate counters, a pendant to highlight an adjacent dining table and a built -in roof light to illuminate a window seat.
“It’s determined lighting,” Ruiz said. “The light is exactly where it is supposed to be, and you don’t need much more.”
The lamps of the floors, the table lamps and the swing arm appliques can do the same next to the sofas and the chairs in a living room, and next to the beds in the rooms, bringing light to each and every one of the places that someone may want to read a book.
Of course, choosing lamps is also an opportunity to bring more sculptural elements to a space. “In the same way that we think of having a diversity of sources of lighting, we plan to have a variety of ways,” he said both in lamps and lamps, Frazier said.
When choosing accessories for a study in the state of New York, for example, he mixed tones with spherical, conical and rectangular shapes for the visual variety.
For a work more focused on a desk or table, decide how the top will turn on. A table lamp may be enough, but articulating task lamps can bring light with precision where you need it.
Beyond serving functional areas, light can add drama to decorative elements such as paintings and sculptures. When Taylor and Miller renewed a living room with a high roof in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the company installed a small pendant that extends to the eye level to illuminate sculptures on a table in a corner.
“We have art lighting in just a beautiful fallen pendant,” O’Leary said, which makes it a dramatic focal point.
Mr. Frazier used a minimalist task lamp in his room to illuminate objects collected at a console table. “Wash those sculptural objects, almost like a curiosities cabinet,” he said.
For works mounted on the wall, cable or cable image lights can highly highlight special pieces while adding a soft brightness to the room.
Take control
With so many different accessories in a room, control them all may seem discouraging.
Smart house systems, such as Lutron’s caséta, allow all accessories to control with a single command from a switch mounted on the wall or an application for smartphones, and to configure different lighting scenes where numerous accessories are attenuated at pre -established levels.
“Lighting control systems are much more accessible than they used to be,” said Miller. “Fifteen years ago, obtaining lighting scenes in a space would have cost him $ 50,000; now he can obtain basic home depot systems that provide that same capacity for much less.”
When you get home and call your layers of light well designed to illuminate a room as you want it, he said: “It’s magical.”
