Basics of Lighting Design — Part 1
Lighting design is one of the most important aspects of interiors. It not just creates the required atmosphere for your room, but also brings life into your space by reflecting various colours, textures and other elements which have been used for its design. It is often not given enough thought during the design process. Understand the different layers of lighting, light fixtures and its uses here.
Lighting can be classified into 3 layers based on the specific purpose they serve.
1. Ambient lighting
Ambient lighting or general lighting is the first layer that a designer usually works on. It is the combination of sunlight from windows, doors and other wall openings along with artificial lights. It illuminates the room evenly so that it is completely visible to our eyes.
2. Accent lighting
Accent lighting is used to highlight a particular area of your home. This layer of lighting gives the impression of having a space with a lot of design elements in it like a plant corner, family wall, feature wall with a wallpaper or any design element. Here, the feature wall has been highlighted with accent lights.
3. Task lighting
Task lighting as the name suggests is used for specific tasks. The simplest example for this is a desk lamp which is solely used for the purpose of studying. Typically, a task light is used only for a specific purpose.
There is another layer of lighting in addition to these called the decorative lighting. Its main purpose is to look nice and add aesthetics to the space like the one shown below.
Pro tip: Decorative lights can be used as a focal point for styling your room.
Usually designers start by deciding on ambient lights and then proceed towards lighting required for aesthetics and specific tasks. Some of the essential things to remember while designing with these layers of lighting are-
- The amount of lighting used in a room directly depends on its purpose. Kitchen, dining and washrooms would require more amount of lighting than other areas like your bedrooms, closets, hallways and corridors. Light required for a room also depends on the amount of natural light flowing into the particular space and the ambience that you would want to create using artificial lighting.
- Using LED light fixtures is a great way to save energy and reduce your monthly expenses. The initial costs might be high but it definitely reduces the pinch on your pocket in the long run.
3. Accent and Task lighting can be used interchangeably. In this photograph, the light strip under the wall cabinet highlights the material and design of the kitchen. It also provides enough light to work on the countertop. The light strip here serves both the purposes.
4. A simple thumb rule that many designers use to calculate the amount of lighting required for an area is to first determine the overall area of the space. If a room is 10'X10', then the area is 100sft. Each square feet approximately requires 20 lumens. Multiply this with the overall area to get the total lighting requirement for the room. In this case, it would be 2000 lumens. For areas like bathrooms and kitchens, 80 to 90 lumens per square feet is suggested.
Lighting basics shall be continued in the next article. Stay tuned!
