The days of big lights are officially over. It’s not that chandeliers or huge centrally hung lights aren’t beautiful, eye-catching, or can’t add a great finishing touch to a room, but when was the last time you actually turned on a light, except when you were looking for something? And then turned it off the moment you found what you were looking for? Using big lights as a lighting idea now proves to be more decorative than functional.
Of course, I installed big lights in every room in the house and some very eye-catching pieces like the big round chandelier I hung as a lighting idea in my living room (you can see it at the top of this page). I don’t regret it for a second, because it’s a piece of art I love and it always elicits a gasp of WOW when someone walks into the room. But realistically, I rarely turn the lights on, instead preferring the glow of a sconce at the edge of the room or the gentle, bulbous glow of a table lamp above the fireplace.
And now I’m wondering, if you were to give advice to someone who’s just starting a renovation and is looking at ways to save money, would you recommend not putting in any loud lights at all?
Why designers avoid using large lights in their projects
(Image courtesy of Uliana Grishinaa. Design by Studio Enass)
“I love the ambience of wall lighting,” says Molly Kidd, chief creative and principal designer at Oregon-based studio Light & Dwell, who recently completed a project for an English cottage-style home in the woods outside Portland that had very few large lights. “The ceilings were very low, only 8 feet high, so it was important for the wall lighting to take center stage,” she says.
And that ambience she’s referring to is exactly what designers are gravitating towards right now: a feeling of being gently enveloped in light rather than being completely overwhelmed by it (as can sometimes be felt with frenetic overhead lighting).
That’s the approach that designer Enas Mahmoud of Studio Enas took for the apartment pictured above. “Pairing the wall lighting with Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue adds a shimmering bounce of light throughout the room, enhancing its ambiance,” Enas says. She also added floor and table lamps, just in case, but kept them away from the overhead lighting. “Lighting small moments individually is great for adding personality to a space,” she says. “And they bounce off the cocoon-like wall color like shimmer. I’m obsessed with Little Green’s Red Alas and Farrow & Ball’s Deep Reddish Brown at the moment. Both are reddish browns that work incredibly well with brass, gold, and antique fixtures.”
(Image courtesy of Arteriors London)
Meanwhile, even big-name lighting designers are finding that larger fixtures lose their appeal. “I’m not completely against statement fixtures,” says Michael Anastassiades, a world-renowned designer of lighting fixtures for decades. “But the problem is that after the initial excitement and wow factor wears off and they’re not as exciting anymore.”
“I’m not comfortable with having too much light in a space,” says Los Angeles-based interior designer Jake Arnold. “Except in the kitchen, too much overhead lighting doesn’t sit well with me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you shouldn’t have overhead lighting at all. I don’t think a pristine ceiling is very luxurious.”
How to light your home without big lights
(Image provided by: OKA)
Another world-renowned lighting designer who is against big lights is Tom Dixon. “Of course I’m not saying you don’t need my pendant lights on the ceiling,” he says, “but I don’t recommend a ton of lighting coming from above – it looks really bad, and spotlights in particular have this effect. Instead, fill the room with light. Place adhesive LED strips under counters or behind sofas to distribute the light and think of different lights as adding texture rather than just illumination.”
Michael agrees that layering is key. “You can’t just have one central light in the middle of the room and expect it to light everything,” he says. “It would lose all its poetry. Instead, it’s useful to diffuse the light at different heights in the room and be able to combine different glows depending on your purpose.” A combination of floor lamps, table lamps and wall lights is the smartest and most flexible approach.
He also advises caution against spotlights: “I don’t like to point spotlights at a piece of art or an object I’ve purchased to highlight it,” he says. “There’s beauty in allowing the light around an object to change rather than be perfectly constant. A home is not a museum. Spotlights force you to focus on the place that’s lit and never allow you to experience the piece of art from a twilight or candlelight perspective. And that kind of low level lighting can create such a magical effect!”
(Image courtesy of Graham & Green)
Final thoughts
Now I understand why designers have moved away from big lights: As Michael says, there’s something magical about soft pools of light, and I love the feeling of reading under a floor lamp placed just behind an accent chair, angled towards a book. It gives me a safe, soft, calming feeling that a big central light never gives me.
But this doesn’t mean I don’t believe in overhead lighting anymore. In fact, what I would suggest is to still invest in overhead lighting and use it as a decorative accessory, similar to the way you would add jewelry to your outfit, but hang it in a corner of the room so that it doesn’t take up the whole space and only illuminates your reading chair.
A plain white ceiling with no lighting at all looks very odd, and of course there are times when you need to light up your ceiling bulbs, but instead, make your main focus on the occasional light and the art of mini light pools, a key lighting trend that is here to stay.
In our feature article, we explore further elements of the Big Right debate.
