Designing the Lighting in Your New Home
By Harden Custom Homes 03 Jul 2019

Lighting is one of the most important things to think about for the design of your new home, but it is also the thing people often spend the least amount of time considering.  A good or bad lighting design can be the difference between whether or not a home office is a productive work space, whether the dining area is comfortable for family gatherings, or whether the living room feels open and accessible.  Lighting influences in many subtle and subconscious ways the way in which we feel in a space, and it’s very important to get the lighting design right. It’s very important to consider the lighting design early on in the process.  You don’t want to leave it as an afterthought.  Many kinds of lighting these days are integrated into the structure of the room, and that requires planning ahead of time.  You don’t want to have to remodel a brand new home because you didn’t plan for a cool lighting scheme ahead of time.  This will also give you the chance to plan more than one light source, which will help to eliminate shadows and dim areas that can’t be reached by the light. Another important consideration is to plan out your expectations for the lighting in your space.

Are there areas that you want to highlight or others you want to diminish?  This can help determine where you want to place lights and if there are any areas you want to leave less lighted.  For example, in a dining room, the light usually highlights the table, so planning the room and the lighting with a particular table location in mind is a good idea.  But perhaps there are other areas that will need highlights, such as serving areas or display cabinets.  Likewise, you can plan to leave certain areas of the room more dimly lit to help make the highlight more prominent. Many interior lighting designers suggest putting as many lights as possible on a dimmer switch.  This will not only give you many options for how the room is lit, but also offers opportunity for energy savings.  The flexibility that a dimmer provides can help you adjust the mood of the room whenever you want.  At dinner time, the dining table might be most appropriately highlighted, but maybe after dinner that light can be dimmed while another highlight can be brightened, offering a completely different feel for the space. Flexibility and variety are probably the most important aspects of a good lighting design.  Things like dimmer switches help give your lights a lot of flexibility, and installing lighting fixtures at different heights and of different styles helps with variety.  Overall, be sure to plan your lighting needs as early as possible so that it can be seamlessly incorporated into the construction of your new custom home.

If you have any questions or concerns about constructing your new custom home, be sure to contact Harden Custom Homes at (239) 205-2075.