The final touches on your home design are often the last things you consider, but when you finish, you may notice that something doesn’t feel quite right within the room. Lighting is the primary reason the way a space feels is affected by all aspects of your design. Lighting creates emotion, creates a sense of size and warmth, and creates how your other design selections will look in the room.
In addition, there’s currently an increase in use and design of ceiling lighting. Down lighting was the choice of many home designers until 2020, whereas more people are using statement ceiling lights, which are both functional and visually appealing.
The Return of the Feature Pendant and Chandelier
While traditional flush-mount fixtures can be good for illuminating an area uniformly, they tend to be anonymous. The trend towards centrepiece lighting such as pendants and chandeliers is indicative of the larger trend towards introducing more personality into our living spaces.
The presence of a five-light ceiling light or chandelier, for exampe, brings presence to your room. Centrepieces such as these draw your attention upwards, provide a sense of occasion in common spaces and establish a design anchor point for other elements within that room.
Pendant lighting provides ideal lighting for dining tables and kitchen islands due to their ability to provide a large spread of light to a broad surface area, while providing a layered and atmospheric lighting effect that cannot be created with a single pendant or other standalone light fixtures.
Warm Tones Are Back
The cool white light predominantly used throughout the popularity of downlights gave domestic interiors a very bright, clean, and clinical feel. However, due to the now-accepted use of warm white and amber-toned (warm) light, this has changed the feel of domestic interiors considerably. With the advent of both LED technology and the greater availability and energy efficiency of warm tones; the previous trade-off between warmth and running costs no longer exists.
Colour temperature is now becoming a conscious design consideration, rather than simply an understanding of how to make something work, warmer tones being better suited to living and bedroom areas and cooler tones to kitchens and bathrooms has become standard design practice in layering colour temperature throughout the commercial or domestic environment.
Smart Lighting and Dimming Control
It is now commonplace to control how light looks – changing brightness/colour temperature using both a smartphone or an assistant. Smart lighting systems allow people to create different moods at various times of day with no need to physically manipulate the switch.
This ease of controlling ceiling fixtures is especially useful, for example changing from having lights on bright and shining while cleaning or working to having them dimmed and creating ambience when doing something during the evenings in one’s home, while leaving the fixture unchanged between the two experiences.
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Natural Materials and Artisan Finishes
Ceiling light fittings constructed from natural, handcrafted materials such as rattan, woven bamboo, hand-blown glass, hammered brass and raw concrete are experiencing a surge in popularity. These types of materials add warmth and texture to otherwise uninteresting-looking areas of the home.
If you have nothing but a ceiling full of generic downlights, even investing in one major feature – especially in the main living area where a very well-thought-out ceiling fixture would be positioned – can give a very different meaning to the entire space as well as give guests an entirely different experience in the area.
