Light is a magical tool. Its role in photography and painting is crucial and it’s just as important in home interiors. With proper lighting and light modifiers, you can either get in the romantic mood, give yourself an energy boost, or make a relaxing atmosphere to read before going to sleep.
Living room lighting is particularly tricky and it actually requires more careful planning than, e.g., sleeping or children’s room. The living room is usually the biggest one in your home. It’s also quite popular to have a living room combined with a kitchenette. Each type of living room requires slightly different kinds of lighting.
To help you start planning we prepared a couple of tips and ideas for the bright side of the interior design. Now let us illuminate you!
The Light from Above
The main source of light should be pendant lighting. The exact location of the lamp and the type of casings depend on the room’s size and setting.
For big rooms (e.g., 30m2 and more) we can advise you to divide the room into two parts with the help of lighting — into a typical living room part and a chill-out zone. The thing is to locate the main pendant lighting over the full-active part of the room. Thanks to the size of the room you can decide for a chandelier with a few lightbulbs or a ceiling lamp with a see-through casing. This way you’ll get a lot of strong light that has enough of space to spread around.
If you don’t have the possibility or just don’t want to relocate the wires from the middle of the ceiling, provide your lighting with a dimmer. You’ll be able to control the evenly distributed overhead light level.
Small living rooms, especially with low ceilings, can easily get overloaded with light. In this case, we would definitely recommend using the dimmer and avoiding clear glass lamp shades or naked lightbulbs. Inside small spaces, too much light will tire your eyes and make you irritated. Click here for more pendant lighting inspiration.
The Illuminated TV Corner
Overhead lighting, even when lowered down, isn’t the best for movie night marathons and watching TV in complete darkness is harmful to your sight. It’s the moment when LED tape lighting comes for the rescue!
You can fix the tapes directly on the sides behind the screen and on shelves above. What’s more — the LED tape fixtures can be steered with a remote! The tapes will work great also in the role of wall lights, fixed to the top shelves or behind a couch.
Instead of the Curtains
Heavy curtains gathering loads of dust or window blinds squashing mosquitos are relicts. Give your living room a breath of fresh air of Scandinavian inspiration! Walking around Swedish cities you can notice that most of the houses don’t have the windows covered. It might seem like a lack of intimacy or exhibitionism. Nothing more wrong.
Instead of using any kind of material curtains they often choose the curtain of light! It’s either lighting fixtures mounted just by the window frames or standing lamps with their heads pointed to the windows directly.
Such a solution blocks the view of your living room to the people outside. Of course, it doesn’t assure you 100% invisibility but is a subtle and elegant way to separate yourself from the outside world.
Unplugged Ambience
Lighting is not only wires, lightbulbs, and fancy lamp shades. You can also make candlelight an actual part of the living room lighting. Instead of putting candles around randomly or lining them up on a coffee table, you can plan how to distribute the candlelight so it makes sense with the rest of the fixtures. Our tips are:
- Large candle stands at the windows or on a dresser.
- Small lanterns hanging over the windowsills or from individual shelves.
- Tall and small candles grouped together in different corners of the room standing on high stools.
- Little aromatherapy altar with unscented candles, essential oil burners, and incense sticks.
Having a real fireplace at home is a rather luxurious dream, very often just impossible to make it come true. Candles are adorable, cheap, and easy to organize an alternative. Multiple candlelight spots will help you create a warm hygge mood in your living room without digging through the walls.
You can decorate your nest with various plants, knitted blankets, many soft pillows… But if you won’t take care of proper lighting, all the accessories won’t do the trick. Lighting is like the final touch of interior design.
Turn the living room into your calm and safe space where you want to come back and soothe your senses after a long day, have a glass of wine with your friends, or just lay down on the couch on a cold and lazy afternoon and watch your favourite TV show. Complete the mood with the lighting just the way you feel like at the moment and forget about all the day’s sorrows!
