8 minute read
The Hidden Details That Define Great Residential Lighting
By STACIE DINWIDDY HLB Lighting Design
Over the last five years, private residential construction has been making waves in the design industry. Lower interest rates have allowed settled homeowners to consider financing options to fund large-scale construction costs and has encouraged a buyer-seller market when a new location or layout was desired.
While the pressure of higher interest rates has slowed the rise in proposals for new construction in recent years, home improvements remain in demand and continue to accumulate pace. With the pivot to hybrid working environments, many homeowners tested the flexibility of every room, evaluated the overall functionality of floor plans, and developed a keen awareness of the influence lighting has on physical health and mental well-being.
The growing influence and exposure to home renovation shows like Love It or List It and Fixer Upper coupled with access to social media and DIY channels has made many homeowners and electricians more confident in their skillsets in delivering high-end residential design solutions. Aisles in home improvement and upscale furnishing retailers now stock spec-grade options and decorative lighting showrooms offer consumers free design services in-house.
With a range of tangible resources available to meet budget and bypass lead times, what are our selling points to homeowners and residential design teams to explore full-scope services with professional lighting designers?
Only in our homes do we fully experience the profound impact of great lighting design. Just as Gregg Mackell described in the previous issue, the process of lighting design is not limited to the placement, specification, and performance of a light source. Outside the home, multiple shareholders are typically involved in the ownership of a design, and there is an acceptance that no one person will experience a space the same way – perhaps not even as it was intended by the design team.
However, a residence is private to a single family, challenging the design team to deliver an experience unique yet specific to the homeowner’s needs for comfort, function, and style.
Typical details are rarely standard in a residence. Material finishes and features are considered within each room to specify the best detail and fixture selection. A partial renovation of a property once led to four distinct types of cove lighting, and while the end results were all the same – soft indirect illumination from a concealed linear light source –the installation and light effect were unique to each application.
In commercial and hospitality settings, an inverse cove detail along a core wall might encourage movement or highlight a niche to invite one to sit for a moment. In those settings, normal viewing angles are evaluated for optimal mounting location and lensing to prevent direct view of the light source. The same fixture and detail can often be used for both applications. When designing similar details in residences, we often find ourselves on the floor or laying on our backs to ensure not one diode is reflected on any surface.
Lighting details can affect how large or small the space feels as much as it affects how one feels in the space. Low-level lighting can effectively ground an architectural element or float a piece of millwork, while inverse coves and grazing wall finishes can increase a room’s perceived height.
Most important to achieving these effects in residential lighting is the actual scale of the detail. Linear cove details calling out wide mounting shelves and deep offsets between soffit and shelf are reminiscent of the linear fluorescent profiles, lending to a more commercial outcome. In contrast, a soft halo of light seeping from a crown molding a few inches shy of the ceiling adds a residential touch to a hallway. Integrating indirect lighting at ceilings and structures is carefully thought out to avoid looking like an afterthought or taking away from the solidity of a structural element.
Avoiding lighting within faux structural elements is also important as these details often expose the element as a fake. Millwork lighting is a signature offering for residential lighting designers. A variety of details are carefully coordinated with joinery manufacturers, design team members, and homeowners to achieve the best placed light sources to highlight a variety of items on display – often resulting in multiple details at each shelf. Placement of a linear or point source, aiming angle, extrusion thickness, and lens translucency are studied to ensure minimal distraction and desired illumination effect. Millwork materials, finishes, shelf depth and mobility, and displays are all factored into the technical specification that a residential lighting designer uses in coordination with the team.
Often, designers will defer to a range of suggestions provided standard by a joinery manufacturer, which are commonly provided as a low-output LED tape set in a shallow recessed lensed extrusion mounted along the top front edge of each shelf in a display. The shallow extrusion exposes the spacing between diodes as dots along the lens. The LED tape itself is typically outsourced in bulk at a discount rate, leading to mismatched color along each run or between displays.
Color temperature and rendering of light sources are additional specification options considered less personal outside the home. As LEDs have evolved, so have the options available off-the-shelf. Unfortunately, homeowners, electricians, and contractors end up in lighting aisles overstocked with ambiguous color temperatures, dimming options, and lamp style.
Lighting designers seek to provide an education of all available options to avoid some of the common misconceptions the influx of offerings has created. For example, warm does not mean dull and yellow, and bright lighting can be achieved with sources that are not labeled bright or cool white. Demonstrating the differences between clear and frosted bulbs as well as filament shape and style in decorative lamps on site helps to identify those most complementary of the fixture and most compatible for low-end dimming.
Individual art pieces or collections often sway color temperature selection in residential design. When illuminated in the proper color and level of light, art will take on new composition – exposing colors, linework, and textures once hidden in the soft glow of a single light source. Accompanying clients to showrooms and providing displays enables a lighting designer to visually translate the different offerings in color temperature as well as dynamic lighting and control options.
Design teams in multiple market sectors prioritize end-user experiences and community impact. Sports entertainment districts, for example, are built up around stadiums to provide fans with an entertaining and winding path of revenue enroute to their suite designed to feel like they never left their living room. Commercial buildings provide quiet and collaborative workspaces, offering employees a flexible and comfortable environment and the human interaction often missed when working remotely. Restaurants and lounges draw inspiration from residential dining and living spaces – offering intricately-designed and architecturally interesting venues for social hosting without the cleanup after the last guest has left.
If lighting designers are sought in these sectors not to sell the latest technology and market trends but to celebrate every project’s architectural and interior features in their best light, residential lighting should follow the same principle. By reviewing your next residential lighting concept with a professional lighting designer, you can ensure a design so comfortable that homeowners will find it hard to leave— except to discover new inspirations for their next renovation or property purchase.
