Lighting a room in layers

A single central pendant lights a room evenly from above. Even light from above is what you want in an operating theatre. In a living room it removes every shadow that gives a space depth, throws light onto the parts of the room nobody looks at, and puts the people in it under the least flattering light available.

The alternative is not more lights. It is different lights doing different jobs, on different switches, so the room can be one thing at eight in the morning and another at nine at night.

The three layers

Think of any room as needing three kinds of light, and treat them as separate systems.

The first is ambient, the general level that lets you move about safely and see the shape of the room. It should be soft and it should mostly come from the walls or from bounced light rather than shining straight down.

The second is task. Light aimed at the specific place where something happens. The chair you read in. The worktop you chop on. The desk. The mirror. Task light should be bright, close to the task, and switchable on its own, because most of the time you only need one of them.

The third is accent, which is light that exists to make the room look like something. A picture, a shelf, a plant, the texture of a plastered wall raked by a wall light. This is the layer that people leave out and then wonder why the room looks like an office.

A small room needs all three. It does not need many fittings, it needs the right three or four.

It matters most in rooms where people are uncomfortable. In the waiting room for a dental practice the entire room had been lit by four panel fittings on one switch, and the single most effective change was making sure nobody sat directly underneath a light source.

Switching is the whole thing

If you take one thing from this: the layers must be on separate switches. A room with six fittings on one switch is worse than a room with two fittings on two switches, because you have gained brightness and lost every setting except on and off.

In a normal living room we would expect three circuits. Ambient, which might be two wall lights. Task, which is usually plugged in at a switched socket by the chair. Accent, which might be a single fitting over the fireplace or a picture light. Add dimming to the ambient circuit and the room has a genuine range.

Five way switch plates are ugly and confusing. Two or three switches, clearly grouped, will get used. Anything more becomes a puzzle nobody solves and people default to putting everything on.

Downlights, and when they are wrong

Recessed downlights have a place, mostly in kitchens and bathrooms, positioned over the surfaces you work at. What they are not is a general lighting solution, and a grid of them across a ceiling is the single most common lighting mistake in modern British houses.

They are especially wrong in a sloping ceiling. A downlight in a slope does not point down, it points diagonally, and it throws an oval of light onto the opposite wall. In the loft conversion in a 1930s semi we used wall lights on the flat section instead, and it is both better and cheaper.

They are also wrong in an old house with exposed structure. Every downlight in a beam is a hole drilled into the thing that makes the room worth having. In the living room in a listed farmhouse, taking eleven of them out of a seventeenth century beam was the first item on the schedule.

Colour temperature and the number that matters

Lamps are sold with a colour temperature in kelvin. Around 2700K is a warm domestic white, roughly what a traditional bulb gave. 3000K is slightly crisper and reads well in kitchens and bathrooms. Anything at 4000K and above is a daylight white and belongs in a workshop.

Colour temperature also has to be settled alongside the wall colour rather than after it, for the reasons set out in choosing paint for a north facing room. A lamp is part of the palette.

The rule that matters more than the number is consistency. A room with a 2700K lamp on one side and a 4000K lamp on the other looks broken and nobody can say why. Pick one temperature for a room and use it in every fitting, including the one inside the extractor hood.

The other specification worth checking is the colour rendering index, written as CRI or Ra. Below 80 and colours in the room start to look slightly wrong, particularly reds and skin tones. Above 90 is genuinely noticeable in a room where you have thought about the paint colour. It costs a little more and it is the difference between the paint you chose and a version of it.

Where to put the fittings

Wall lights should sit at around 1.6m to 1.8m above floor level, which puts the source above eye level for a standing adult and lets the light wash the wall. Too low and you look into the lamp. Too high and it lights the ceiling.

A reading light wants to come from behind and to the side of the shoulder, not from in front. A pendant over a dining table wants to hang so the bottom of the shade is around 750mm above the table, which is lower than most people fit them and is the height at which it lights the food rather than the faces.

In a kitchen, stand where you chop and notice where your shadow falls. If the only light is behind you, you are working in your own shadow, which is what under cupboard lighting exists to fix. In the cafe refit on a market square the same principle at a commercial scale meant three separate circuits, one bright over the counter and two much lower over the seating.

A short specification for a normal living room

Two wall lights on a dimmer for ambient. A floor lamp beside the main chair on a switched socket for task. One accent fitting, aimed at something worth looking at. A table lamp on a second switched socket if the room is large. That is four or five fittings, three switches, and it will beat any number of downlights.

Plan it at the same time as the layout, not at the end. Sockets and switch positions are cheap to move on a drawing and expensive to move once the plaster is on.