It’s all about light

Lighting is not an afterthought. If anything it should, and it inevitably will be if done well, the single biggest chunk of your interior budget. Too many people try to “forget” lighting out of their budget.

All too often we notice the lighting because it is unpleasant; offices lit with row after row of aggressive neon, apartment building lobby areas lit like football stadiums, restaurants that make your food look grey etc.

Lighting is about comfort. If the lighting in a given space is installed properly it will improve the user’s comfort, simple as that. And that can be a relatively subtle thing.

Some lighting is purely functional and logical. You need a specific amount of light to comfortably read a document in front of you. You need a specific amount of light in an area where you will be using a knife.

At other times it’s decorative, whether it is a beautiful pendant lamp, or using the shape of a spotlight to “draw” light on a red wall in a plush club.

Lighting is changing; new technologies like LED and compact fluorescents are making the incandescent light bulb a thing of the past and offer new ways of illuminating a space.

I can’t tell you what to do but, if you are redoing your home or office or building from scratch or whatever, get a lighting consultant in, or check that your architect knows a thing or two about light, cause they don’t necessarily . . .