Design Expert’s Guide to Lighting Your Interior | Tricks of the Trade

When we got married, I took a box of light bulbs to the hotel and made them change all the light bulbs. Hi, I'm Brandon Schubert. I'm an interior designer and today I'm going to show you how to design and execute a lighting theme for your home. I love designing lighting for interiors. First of all, the room has to work, so you need function. But more importantly, lighting gives the room its energy and its atmosphere once the sun has gone We're here today at a project in South London that I designed to look at the lighting schemes, how we've designed them, and how they work in each given space. Let's look at lighting a sitting room. I always started lighting design with a floor plan. If you don't have a professional floor plan like we do, you can always sketch something out on graph paper or with a scale rule if you want. Someone told me once that the most important rule of lighting design is to light objects and surfaces, not space. There's something about seeing the room from above that allows you to sort of visualize the objects you're trying to light rather than the space as you're standing in it. The other thing to think about is lighting different levels of a room. So we have ceiling lights, which are above your head. We might have wall lights at eye level, and we might have table lamps at below eye level. But it's important to get lighting at all of those levels so that a room feels natural and sort of immersive when you're standing in it at night. These two lights by the bookcase, they're washing the front of the bookcases down so that you get a glow on the books themselves rather than just pointing at the ground. The two decorative wall lights either side are giving you a really subtle glow and in fact I put a very low wattage bulb in those and I also have put a gold line shade on them so that they just give you a warm hint of light. But they're not doing anything really, they're just giving you ambient light. I've got a track running on the horizontal side of this wall all the way down one side so that those lights can point at the wall opposite. So they're providing that surface with a glow at night. I love table lamps. You know I could buy table lamps all day. I spend my days on eBay buying up vases and turning them into lamps. It's one of the joys of my design career. Think about them as a great accessory for making your lighting scheme feel varied and feel decorative because they have great decorative value in addition to being a source of light. The floor lamp by the chair is giving you the ability to sit there and read a book in the evening and it's also giving you height in what would otherwise be a fairly empty corner. I've also put a large floor lamp by this easy chair in the corner because again you want that height to sort of fill the space. Now we're going to look at lighting a kitchen and dining space. It's very often the case that your kitchen and a dining space are connected. So we think about lighting those two elements together. When you're lighting a kitchen the first thing to think about is task lighting. Kitchens are all about function. In a kitchen I use down lights to light a surface that we're going to be using to work. So if you think about a kitchen island for example it is important that that island be lit uniformly and be lit from more than one direction so you don't end up with uncomfortable shadows that get in your way when you're trying to work. Because this is quite a narrow room we can't really have table lamps and other decorative fittings on that side. So again I've settled for recessed down lights shining on those walls just to give them a glow and here as well. When you're buying a down light you oftentimes have a choice of getting a fixed down light or getting one that will tilt and it's much better to wash a wall with light than it is just to pour light down onto the floor. But what do you do when you want to set the mood for a dinner party or an evening where you're having friends over and people are going to be in the connected room looking at the kitchen? I've used under counter lighting under the cupboards above. If possible I use LED strips and I like to position them at the front edge of the cupboards above so that they don't cast a funny shadow when they shine down on the splashback behind the worktop. And running along the top lighting up onto the ceiling. They can both be turned down on a dimmer switch to just provide a soft glow that just accentuates the room without lighting it up brightly. So in the dining room again we're going to start with the furniture plan as the driver of where things go. Clearly the dining table's in the center of the room and we want a pendant over the dining table. What I like about this light is not only does it have a lot of character as an antique light fitting but these Vaseline glass shades hide the bulbs a bit and soften the light giving it a little bit more moodiness a little bit more diffused character. Dimmers are especially important in a dining room. You always want to be able to turn that central light over the dining table down to a very low level when you're having a meal. We then have space for furniture all the way around the outside so we have two pieces of furniture either side of the chimney breast and a sideboard running along this wall. So I've taken the opportunity to put table lamps on each of those pieces of furniture. The other thing I think about all the time with table lamps is the size and shape that they are. I try not to put a very heavy table lamp on a very small table because I think it's out of proportion. If you can get the balance into the right place where the table lamp sits comfortably on the thing that it's on it will feel more natural. That's all the light fittings we have in this room table lamps and the central light over the dining room. That said there's plenty of opportunity to bring in candles and other kinds of lights when the mood requires. Let's talk about how to light a bedroom. I think anytime you enter a room you want a light switch that operates at least one light in a room and bedrooms are no different. So in this bedroom I've started with a ceiling light which I positioned in the center of the room. By the way an interesting way to find the center of a room if you're in doubt is to draw a line from one corner to the other corner in a diagonal and then draw another diagonal line from that corner to the other corner which ignores a chimney breast and one of the things people often mistake is they take the center line from the chimney breast to the other wall rather than doing it with an X. So I started with a central ceiling light in this room. I've also added a 5 amp circuit to control the lamps in this room. This is a way that you can control table lamps by a switch. I'm making a small symbol which is for a 5 amp socket showing how those lamps will be switched and we put two bedside lamps either side of the bed and these are not operated on the 5 amp circuit they're switched on the lamps themselves. The choice of light bulbs is super important to the way a table lamp or any light fitting works. I personally like most table lamps to be on a lower wattage bulb so that they're just providing a warm yellow glow. I also really pay attention to color temperature. I really try to avoid anything above 2700 degrees kelvin. I stay away from 3000 and I definitely stay away from 4000 because they put out a cold blue light that just isn't inviting. In this small bedroom which is a cozy intimate space I wanted to make sure we got a variety of different types of lights. In this room in terms of circuits I've broken the ceiling light and the wall lights up. You can turn those wall lights on so that they greet people as they come up the stairs and it isn't just a dark room but it equally isn't a fully lit room. I've also put a single bedside lamp between the single beds which is not switched at the door but is instead switched on the lamp itself. With a bedside lamp the height is super important. You don't want to be distracted by the glare of a light bulb as you're trying to read your book at night so you size the table lamp according to the height of the bed, the height of the bedside table, and the position of the person who's going to be reading.