Interior Design Masterclass - Light Your Home

1. Introduction To The Class: Great lighting is the best gift you can give your home. It is transformational. Great lighting anticipates your needs, It supports your daily routines by putting light in exactly the right place. And it creates beautiful, dramatic, and relaxing environments. In this information packed class, we'll look at all the key principles of residential lighting. In the second half, we're going to go through the practical process of actually making a scheme of lighting for your home. Everything you need to know to light your home efficiently and beautifully. There's advice for every room, and I'll suggest permanent and temporary lighting solutions ideas also for people who rent. I'm Julia. I'm an interior designer and a design lecturer for more than 20 years. I've split my career between design practice, including lighting design, and teaching at London's Top Design School. My classes bring practical and clear step by step guidance along with professional tips, tricks and shortcuts. Your home is equal parts, gallery, laboratory, theater, and retreat. And it's good lighting that helps you to create and switch the scenes. I'm going to start from the very beginning and I'm going to include simple explanations of the technical aspects of lighting. The principles that you have to know to get the very best out of your home lighting scheme. The information in this class is given in both metric and imperial measurements. I'm really looking forward to our lighting design journey and I'll see you in class. 2. The Class Project: The project with this class is to reconsider the lighting in a room in your home and to create a new lighting solution. Now, there are two levels for this project. There are two ways in which you could engage. Option one is a simple creative exercise. It just involves working conceptually. It would be appropriate if you're working in an existing room and if the lighting exercise is just for your own interests. So you won't be hiring electricians as part of a major overhaul. This simple process involves photographing the room and then painting light directly onto the photographs that you've taken. I'm going to be demonstrating how to do this later in the course. This exercise would help you to see possible new Conceptual solutions for lighting a room that you know well. Option two would be for anybody who wants to develop their ideas for lighting to a greater degree of detail. Perhaps you're renovating your home or building a new home from scratch. And you want to draw a sketch lighting plan. Later on in the class, I'm going to show you how to measure your room and how to produce a symbolic overlay that you could use to underpin conversations with an electrician. I'll show you how to share your ideas using the clearest process of drawn communication. I would love to see either your Conceptual photographs or sketch, lighting plan or both. Any combination of one or the other is absolutely fine. Please do post them in the project space. It would be a thrill to see how either process has worked out for you. 3. Layering Light: Top tip that any lighting designer would give you is that you should lay a Your Lighting. But what does this actually mean? Well, Layering lighting means using multiple sources to light it room. When you introduce light from different directions and different heights, you achieve a cross-legged effects. This models three-dimensional surfaces and washes of flattering light. And don't forget that you two are a 3D surface. Ideally, a large room should be lit by many fittings, fittings at different heights and the room. Ceiling lighting, wall lighting, table lighting, and floor lighting with a combination softly modelling the rooms, various surfaces and forms. But still we want contrast. We want some areas that are brighter and some spots that are more shady. If we just apply it completely, even consistent light across the whole scene. That wouldn't be any focal points or key features. Flat lighting can be very practical, but it can also be really boring. Good design leads the eye and curates a tool through the space, highlighting dominant elements first and then gently inviting the item. Notice other features. Good lighting introduces interest in layers. Then there's glare. We want to minimize glare. Our eyes are drawn two points of light. If there's a bear light source, we can't help but look at it. It's more comfortable to live in rooms of diffused lights with discrete fittings where any exposed sources of light are low enough level not to cause the glare, which in turn can cause temporary blindness. For this class. Here is our lighting design mission statement. We will choose a number of fittings and we'll blend light from different levels and locations. We'll contrast the intensity of light, brighter light to make focal points and with shady areas so that those focal points standout. We'll be picky about the quality of our light to bring out the very best in our home. We'll shells are light sources will filter and diffuse light will make sure that polished surfaces don't reflect views of naked light sources back into the room. Finally, our lighting schemes will be flexible. They will allow us to create different scenes and moods at different times of the day and on different days of the year. 4. General, Task, and Accent Lighting: One easy way to cook up a recipe of LED lighting is to think one at a time about the need for general task and accent lighting. These are the three main categories for lighting. We rely on general light to help us to find a dropped contact lens and to see into the corners of room and make sure that the floor is perfectly clean. General light also allows us to cross a room without tripping or falling down a step or bumping into something. It doesn't have to be at full brightness all the time, only when we need it. And of course, we can call on the other categories of lighting to contribute to the general lighting of the space. We call the strong local light that helps us with specific chores. Task lighting. Task lighting helps us to see when we're working or preparing something, getting our face ready for the day, prepping or cooking food, filling in forms or reading books, mending something. To do any of these tasks, we don't need to brightly light the whole room. We just need a powerful punch of light close up in the workspace. A final category of lighting is Accent or feature lighting. This is look at me lighting. It's like makeup for a room. It draws attention to the very best features of the space. And it creates vocal points. It might include lines of light that accentuate architectural details. Or it could be picture lights or shelf lighting, or a very sharp, strong focus light that is only there to spotlight a beautiful objects. For every room that you design. Think about the lighting three times. So it's like three separate lighting projects. We're gonna be covering the methods of how we do this in greater depth later in the class. We're also going to think about Controlling light and we'll see how dimming general lighting lets us return a room to a subtle mood of mystery and atmosphere. In the next lesson, we will start thinking about where to put Light 5. Painting With Light : Later on in this class, we will be thinking specifically about Rented properties or the winds that you can have on a lower budget. And I'm going to suggest ideas for when. It's just not possible to bash into walls and ceilings. But this is very important. Even if you aren't thinking about a big investment in lighting, when you're designing is always best to pretend that you have a clean sheet and that anything is possible to start with an open mind. And the very highest aims and aspirations. In an ideal world, lighting is not one size fits all. The best. Lighting is custom created to bring out the very best in your home. Lighting should be put exactly where it's needed in order to achieve this. So two identical houses lived in by two different families with different lifestyles, would need completely different lighting plans. In my favorite lighting thought experiment, I pretend that light is a liquid product, that I have a tin of light emitting paint that I can use it to outline with light or to wash also dotted across the surfaces of room. I imagine I can accurately put it in exact places and make perfect shapes of light. I start by working on a plan of the space, a bird's-eye view of the room. In a later lesson, I'll show you exactly how to do this. I always work on plans that have all the furniture sketched in. You do need to have your furniture plan ready in order to make the very best lighting solutions. Before, I said that, we need to think about each room three times. Once for task lighting, once for Accent Lighting, and again for general lighting. By pretending that we can paint light into a room, we can find the best places to put the Light fittings that would actually create the desired effects. This is why it's so important to have furniture shown on plan to. If you want a reading light next to an armchair, then the location of the armchair is a really important piece of information. Now, when we start putting light where it is most needed in the volume, we can get into an area of disagreement between lighting designers and the professional electricians they work with. Electricians take pride in fitting lighting accurately by measuring carefully and using symmetry. A lighting designer might not care about the symmetrical layout of a grid in the ceiling. Lighting designers argue that when the light hits just the right features in a room, no one looks at the ceiling and criticizes the location of the fittings. Very often, magical lighting that ties perfectly with the use of the space doesn't conform to a neat layout pattern. Before we start with the practical side of the course, we need to learn more about the particular technical qualities of lighting. For example, colour Temperature and colour Rendering 6. Colour Temperature: In lighting design, a light bulb is called a lamp. When I say lamp, I'm mostly mean light bulb. Whereas lighting designers use the term luminaire to mean the Decorative fitting that holds the lamp. Light bulbs or lamps and fittings are luminaires. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at the color of light. Now I don't mean coloured light, white light, which can actually be tainted with blue or yellow. So we're going to learn how we can be confident that our white light will be exactly rise and that all of our lighting will be completely consistent and will match. The concepts of Colour temperature in lamps is a mainstream consideration. Now, my local Ikea has a display that shows colour Temperature two really good effects. On its own. It can be hard to see if a white lamp is Colour tainted. But when you compare different products, you can begin to see that some are bluish and others a yellowish. If you go to three sharps and you buy three light bulbs or three lamps, you could end up with very different colored light, as you can see here. This could happen if you bought three lamps from the same shop. This tendency towards warmth or coolness is called Colour temperature. The blue ends of white light is cool and the orange end is categorized as warm light. The great news is that you can specify exact warmth or coolness for your home lighting. You can pick a product from different suppliers and still end up with a matching set. So why does colour Temperature matter? Colour theory, we talk about warm and cool colors, the colors of fire compared to the colours of ice. And colour has an effect on us. It can make us feel warmer or cooler. So in fact, warming up the temperature of the lighting in your home could even make your home feel a little bit warmer. We measure Colour temperature in degrees Kelvin. And most lamp packaging today includes the Colour temperature information. So for example, it might say 3,000 K or 6,000 K. You can see this clearly shown on the packaging of phillips lamps. Warm light is from two-and-a-half to 3,000 colitis room 3,000, 5,000. And when we get above 5,000 and up to about six-and-a-half thousand, we're starting to get into the realm of daylight. Choosing the warmth or coolness of your, of your lighting is an active decision and you should always try to color match Your Lighting exactly. Warm, white light is relaxing, whereas blue or white light can be more stimulating. In a traditionally styled home where candlelight, fire light, and the warm glow of lampshades sets the scene. A yellow or white light could be a good choice. However, an architect might argue for a blue or white light in a contemporary building where I live here in Spain, where it's usually warm. Many of my neighbors choose cool colored lighting. If you're refurbishing your kitchen, it's also worth color matching LED displays so that you don't end up with mismatched red, blue, and green. When in fact, selecting just one color of LED display would look more considered. Colour temperature provides easy wins that everyone can enjoy, whether you own your home or whether you're renting. The important takeaway from this lesson is that you can actively select your preference. Then you can match the color temperature of all your fittings so that you don't end up with what looks like a thoughtless clash of different colors. 7. Colour Rendering: Here's another completely different quality that you can specify when you're working with white light. It relates to how good color looks in your home. White lights contains all the colors of the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum of light ranges from violet to red and passes through blue, green, yellow, and orange. When we blend all of these frequencies of light together, we end up with white light. But don't forget all the colors are still mixed up in there. To enjoy the appearance of blue things in your home, you need blue to be present in your white light. And the same with red, yellow, orange, green, and so on. The white lights in your home has to be a mix of all of the colours. Some lamps emit light that looks white, but it's actually missing some frequencies of coloured light. How well a lamp shows off colour is called colour rendering. It depends on how many frequencies of colored lights are actually there within its white emission, colour Rendering and Colour temperature are not related. They have nothing to do with each other. Warm toned, cool toned lighting can be equally good or bad at rendering colour. Colour Rendering is scored out of 100 on the CRI or colour rendering index. Cri ratings on lamps are usually shown as being greater than so for example, greater than 80 or greater than 90. Old-style incandescent lamps, the ones that have mostly been discontinued in favor of more energy efficient alternatives such as LED, Rented Colour, perfectly scoring 100 on the CRI. And LED is improving all the time. At the time I'm recording this is easy to find LED lamps that achieve greater than 95 or 97 out of 100. Although they can be a bit more expensive than standard LED lamps. The example I'm now showing on the screen compares two different lamps. The top example is deficient in some wavelengths of light. It has almost no blue-green light and some red is missing two. So you might pick this inexpensive lamp for a store room or garage, for example, somewhere where you just need light to see to get around, but not necessarily where you're going to be working with color. In particular. If you have light in your home that is a dad that makes you grind your teeth when you turn it on at night. That could be down to poor colour Rendering, paying a bit more for a lamp that achieves greater than 90 on the CRI is definitely worth it in key rooms. You could splash out on these lamps in the sitting room and use less expensive lamps elsewhere. Unlike colour Temperature, improving the Colour rendering in your home is quick and easy and it works if you're renting. So you could invest in expensive lamps and you could take them with you when you move. If you have colorful collections or wallpaper or artwork, combine this with high-quality, high CRI rated lamps in order to enjoy lively and sparkling color. 8. The Shape Of Light : Working with today's lighting, you have the power to create pretty much without limits. Let's have a look at the Shape of light. This relates to whether Light fittings throughout tight, narrow spots or flood beams, broad washes of light. The same lamp sometimes comes in multiple versions. The difference being the angle of the beam of light emitted by the lamp. Version a might pinpoint or spotlight more narrowly with a tightly focused beam. Perez. Version B creates a flood or a washed effect. You can see the ankle of the beam of the light from a lamp indicated here on the packaging of a Phillips GU ten LED lamp. Beam angles of 36 degrees or standard. It's put, you probably get if you bought off the shelf from a limited supply or it's an electrician will install if you haven't asked for something else. Some lamps come with information guiding you on how narrow or wide a pool of light is going to be, depending on the distance of the net surface from the actual source of the fitting. I've made some very approximate charts in metric and imperial to indicate the spread of light from lance that have different beam angles. Either when they're located closer to or further from a surface. You'll also find these in the class notes now their rule of thumb, and of course, different products could have different outcomes. Let's have a look at the example of calculating how many fittings to install above a kitchen work surface or benchtop. You know, the distance from the ceiling to the counter. The technical specification will explain the diameter of the pool of light. When the beam actually strikes that work top, then you can calculate how many fittings to install so that those pools of light slightly overlap across the whole work top and leave no dark spots in between. So here's an example. And it's an example where the measurement from the ceiling to the work surface is 2 m or six foot six. We're going to be using a standard beam lamp, which has a 360-degree beam angle. The Charles indicates that the pool of light that this lamp would cast on a work top that is 2 m or six foot six below would have a diameter of 1.2 m or forefoot 3 ". Be alert for any obstacles that could block the light. In our example, this would include the wall mounted cupboard. In this case, the cupboard might stop the light from achieving its full coverage on the countertop. If the extractor fan has built-in lighting, this will provide adequate tasks lighting over the hub. You can see in this example that the extreme left and right ends of the work top still lack task lighting. There is an opportunity here to add lighting under the wool unit and under the bottom shelf. Check the colour Temperature is to make sure that these are all consistent and sympathetic. In the example of the Mamas and Monet Museum in Paris, very tight beam spots are used to highlight the paintings. And they pick these out dramatically against the dark wall surface. In your own home. You could mimic this Galerius trick to great dramatic effect. In the kitchen designed by interior designers turnip OK, OK, and expertly lit by lighting designers, lighthouse designs. You can see that a very dramatic narrow beam spot located close to the cupboard doors produces a strong flash of vertical light. Spots is located exactly where the cupboard doors meet. This kind of dramatic lighting effect needs pinpoint precision in terms of how it lines up with the design of the kitchen. Obviously, in this professionally let kitchen colour Temperature is all absolutely consistent. If you want to wash walls with light and lighting the walls, there's often a strategy to visually push out the dimensions of a space and to make us more space appear to be as large as possible, then you might specify a wider angle flood lamp. But if you wanted to create defined stepping stones of light along the corridor floor or tightly highlighter particular piece of ours. Then you would specify a spot lamp with a very narrow angle beam. And of course we'll come on to examples of when you might want an uninterrupted line of light. Because of course, these days in our toolbox, we also have measured lengths of tape light. It's really worth looking at the existing fittings in your home. By changing lamps within existing fittings, you can dramatically improve the effects of light within the room. Again, this upgrade could be made either by homeowner or even if you're currently in temporary accommodation. In the next lesson, we'll look in greater detail at the Accessories that can be used with higher-quality lighting ranges 9. Lamp Accessories : Some higher-quality luminaire ranges include extras such as softening lenses or spreader lenses and Louvre's. Here are some examples for use cases. When some fittings are positions close to a wool, they create sharp edges of light where the light first strikes the wall. Now some people like this, they like a scalloped edge, but if you don't, then using a softening lens will blur the line and wash light more gently. You can see the effect of softening lenses installed here within the lamps that light the portraits at quad Oxford. Even though these fittings are very close to the wool, there are no hard edges or visible scallop shapes. The effect is softer and more diffuse. Louvered filters help to prevent glare when you look up into a down light. Some fittings, recess lamps more deeply within the fitting. This deeper citing it's called a baffle. And again, this helps to reduce glare. So far in these lessons, we've worked hard to avoid the appearance of colored light. That sometimes you want crazy color for a special occasion, rooms that are plain white boxes during the day can become an amazing coloured mosaic at night. Remote control colour changing products are inexpensive and readily available in LED format. I wanted to talk here a little bit about linear lighting and spotlighting. I've mentioned down lighting a few times and I've spoken about beams of light. I've also mentioned overlapping fittings and using lenses to create washes of light, glowing light that doesn't have distinct edges. Of course, instead of working with spots, you can also work with lines of light using LED tape light or fluorescent tubes to create linear light, thin strips of light over long lenses span. This has never been easier or cheaper. Linear lighting also comes with specifiable Colour temperature, with CRI ratings, and with T-Mobile Options. And of course, it comes with color changing options as well. In contemporary lighting design, you'll often see linear Light used around the perimeter of a room to wool wash with down lights popped into the ceiling away from the walls and they bring light into the center of the volume with a very particular function in mind. So different shapes of light can be good for different applications. Always speak to an electrician and to an expert supplier about the possibilities for installation and control. Have this conversation long before your project starts so that you can understand the possibilities of the location and the impact on your budget. Then speak again later on in detail before making any final decisions and before buying any parts. The cost of lighting can sometimes come as a shock. The headline price of a fitting or luminaire often doesn't include the cost of the lamp or any Accessories, The Transformers, drivers, or ballasts that are needed to moderate the electrical flow to the fitting. Not to mention cabling, switching, fireproofing, and of course, on top of all of this, the installation cost involved, what looks like $120 fitting can cost multiples of this before you actually have a functioning light. So find a really good specialists supplier. This could be online to and ask for advice on the likely true cost of a whole suite of paths as part of working through the proposal for your project room. So to wrap up this lesson, you can select your fittings, lamps and lamp Accessories with very specific performance criteria and effects in mind. You can choose the warmth or coolness of white light and you can make sure that all the fittings in the rematch, many fittings today are actually dim to warm. The Colour temperature warms up when you Daimyo fittings at night. You can select lamps to celebrate the brightest colors in your home. You can apply light in lines, spots, pools, floods, and washes, exactly what you need, exactly where you need. It can predict the spread of light on a surface. And you can tailor this to make the practical experience of the space perfect. You can change the effect created by legacy Light fittings, just by changing the lamps. And if you keep the lamps that you've changed out, you can always put them back and take your more expensive products with you when you move. There are many exciting ways to control the effects of light within a simple scheme without installing a crazy number of fittings. 10. Lamp Types: So far we've dealt with three of the foremost important performance criteria for lamps. We looked at colour Temperature, and we understood that some white lights actually are yellowish or bluish. Next, we studied colour Rendering and we realized that to enjoy the full spectrum of color, we need lamps that score highly in terms of colour Rendering, we thought about the Shape of light. We know that we can play with beam angles and we can apply light as if we were theatre lighting technicians showing a tight follow spotlight at zero items in our home. We can make intentional shapes in light, lines, spots, and floods of light. Now I want to add in a fourth consideration that is energy efficiency and lifespan. Because in the last couple of decades there's been a revolution in lighting in terms of energy efficiency and the performance of low energy lamps. Here are the four most common lamp Types in, currently in residential use. Now, I'm starting with incandescent lights and this is the lighting I grew up with as a child. However, it's being phased out and you might find that it actually isn't available in your country. It's called brilliantly in terms of Colour rendering 100 out of a hundreds. It was a lovely quality of light. It was DIBL, it was whiter at higher intensity with warmer coloured light when it was deemed it had terrible performance in terms of energy consumption, it creates it as much heat as it did light. And also these would fragile, short-lived units that required regular replacement. Second type of lighting is Halogen, and again, this scores 100 out of 100 in terms of colour Rendering and for producing a lovely quality of light. In terms of energy efficiency, it's marginally better than incandescent light, and it has a slightly longer lifespan. It's still widely available. So 40 watts of energy put into halogen provides the equivalent level of light of roughly 60 watts of incandescent. It's doable and like incandescent light. As you demotes, the Colour temperature of the light gets warmer. Number three is fluorescence, and for many years, fluorescent lighting was the only low-energy alternative to incandescent, and there was some considerable cost in terms of the quality of lighting. Now, new compact fluorescence achieve greater than 80 and Colour rendering there. And they're offered in a variety of color temperatures. Energy consumption in lifespan are similar to LED. They lost more than ten years if they're used for about 3 h a day. So don't write off fluorescent lighting. There are some great products out there. However, the emergent, rightful heir to incandescent light is led. Last couple of decades, led products have attracted the greatest interest and investment as low energy alternatives to incandescent lighting. And the rate of progress and improvement has been magnificent. Led uses, about a fifth to a tenth of the energy that was required by old school incandescent sources. Led engines and LED bulbs are sometimes called engines, as well as lamps, last ten times as long as incandescent lights, better quality LED lamps have stable colour Temperature and they achieve greater than 97 in terms of Colour rendering there decibel, although sometimes they need special dimmer switches that recognize the fact that they have a tiny load. Some of the lamps mentioned above run on mains voltage direct into the fitting. Other fittings, some LED, some fluorescent and low voltage halogen, might need additional parts to adapt the powers of the fitting, particularly if you plan to operate the fitting using a dimmer switch. Halogen fittings might need transformers. Led fittings might need drivers, and these are also sometimes called transformers. Fluorescent fittings might need ballasts. Sometimes these additional parts are actually built into the lamp, but sometimes not. And you need to research this. There are led, halogen and fluorescent products to create both lines and points of light. You can use a mix of different sorts units. You just need to make sure that you choose products that have the same Colour temperature so that the white light that they give off is the same color of white. When budgeting for a project, don't forget about the additional parts you will need to make the lighting work and to control it. The bits of the lighting installation that are hidden in the walls and the ceiling could double or triple the cost of your projects. Finds a friendly and knowledgeable supplier and Electrician and chat your plans through it an early-stage, get a realistic understanding of the likely costs and challenges of particular combinations. 11. Lux Versus Lumen: When I was young, I thought that light levels were measured in watts. I knew the brightness of a 60 or 100 watt lamp. But actually, what is not a measurement of light? It's a measurement of energy. Some lamps make lots of light with very little energy, whereas others make a fraction of the light for the same energy input. I said that using wattage is not a reliable way of calculating the number of lamps needed in any room. To work out how much light we should put into a space, we need to understand two different ways of measuring Light. Number one, light can be measured in terms of the quantity of light that actually comes out of a Lamp. How much light a lamp emits? Number two, separately, light levels within a room can be measured, and this is unrelated to any particular light fitting. These two measurements are quite different. Light out is measured in Lumen. Light experienced within a space, or at least within a metric space, is measured in Lux. It's so useful to have approximate Lux targets for the different rooms in your home. So here is a rule of thumb chart. Lungs, target levels. Tell us how many lumens of light to install per square meter of space? Anyone in the USA. Here's an alternative charts that gives approximate lumens per square foot. As I mentioned, another way of expressing lux is as Lumen per square meter. So the remaining information you need to work out the number of lamps that you should install in a space is the area measurements of the room. Here's a worked example. A kitchen needs 300 lux, which is another way of saying 300 lumen per square meter. This kitchen is 3 m by 4 m, so it's a total of 12 m². Which means that our target Lumen for this room is 3,600. A rough conversion for the USA would translate our 12 square meter kitchen instead into 120 sq ft. Using the US charts, we need 30 Lumen per square foot. 30 Lumen times 120 sq ft, again, gives us a target total of 3,600 Lumen. In the past, we've looked at this philips lamp and it has an output of 800 Lumen. If we must rely on these lamps exclusively, we'd need for and a half of them. Let's round up to five lamps so that we can be confident that we'll light the whole room. Now, many rooms need local task light. And as you know, task light gives a punch of light exactly where you need it, where you're installing task lights, you should be looking to create a local punch of about 500 to 1,000 Lumen. Because task light is situated right where you need it. In lamps by the bathroom mirror, under wool units in the kitchen or in a desk light. The light source is always close at hand. So the intensity of light is strong and it's uninterrupted by obstacles. In the kitchen where overall light levels of 300 Luxe suggested. Make sure that parts of the overall total for the room includes task lighting, local light that has this additional intensity. Now please remember these tables are rough guidelines, but it is useful to have a starting point. And by working out light and using lumens, again, you can mix led, fluorescent, halogen and so on, and still get to the right output. If you'll be using deferrable circuits, you can add a bit more light because you can always pull it back a bit and avoid over lighting. Even in the most contemporary spaces, it's cozy to pop in Table and floor lighting. So don't forget that these will also contribute to the lighting scheme and that you will need sockets to power them, put sockets wherever you will most likely to need or want additional lighting 12. Exercise One: The first optional exercise of this class is, I hope, a simple task. The next time you're in a store that has a wide range of lamps, maybe a DIY store or supermarket. Take a look at the packaging of a variety of different lamps and see what information you can find out from the box. The better quality the lamp, probably the more expensive it is, the more likely it is to have a detailed specification. But even very basic products should tell you about Colour, temperature, and Lumen output. If you take a photograph of some of the products that you see, you can also do an internet search when you get home and just see if you can find out a little bit more. Because often the manufacturing website carries greater information about the product online, it's really useful to get to know Lamp packaging so that you can choose the very best products to suit your particular needs and your own home. 13. Controlling Lighting: The simplest way to control lance is with an on-off switch, but these need careful consideration. A room has different entry and exit points. You may need simple on-off controls at each one of these. In the UK, we call this two-way switching. In a bedroom, you might want an on-off by the door and another by the bad. Your electrician can help you decide where to put your switches. For example, they'll probably tell you not to put switches that will get lost behind open doors or behind curtains, or where kitchen cabinets or other furniture will be installed in future. And the height of switches might be directed by local building codes, which makes sure that everyone, including people in wheelchairs, can reach and use Your Lighting. Electrician or your local authority or council can advise when you plan lighting for a room. And you know that one set of individual lights will always be used as a set. For example, the lights over your kitchen counter or benchtop. Then these lights are best wired together as a family or group. And we call a group of lights that operate together on a single switch, a lighting circuit. Local building codes, or the electrical load of a group of lights might restrict the number of fittings can be linked together as part of one circuit. So chats your electrician about this, as well as wiring, ceiling or wall lights as families or circuits. Electricians can create circuits of sockets for powering table lamps or floor lamps. And of course, wireless adapters can do this to Controlling circuits from your phone or by voice control using smart speakers. You don't necessarily have to hard wire these solutions in the home. Wireless adapters can also move with you to your new place. Being able to adjust the brightness of light is a lighting design superpower. The mood in a room can be transformed using dimming with a double lighting scheme of three or four circuits. You can create all kinds of different moods in the room. From Brighton lively to romantic or moody, or warming and soothing. So take advice when you work with demo bowl circuits. All parts of the installation must allow dimming. You need to check the compatibility of the parts. Is the fitting and the lamp DIBL are any necessary electrical adapters. T-mobile is the dimmer switch calibrated to the type and load of the fitting. Is the cabling appropriate? If you buy fittings from a specialist installer, they can help you mix and match products. And of course, a good electrician will ensure that your system works just as you would like. Really good idea to be inspired by commercial lighting. So take a look when you're out in bars, restaurants, hotels, or shops. As part of your project, think about how you will use the space both practically and for special occasions when you want a magical environment. And dimming is the device that will enable a simple lighting scheme to flex and deliver great lighting solutions every time. The next level of lighting design involves installing programmable lighting control systems such as neutron. With programmable lighting control, the switch box is usually presented as a panel of small buttons. And lighting scenes are designed to match them living Rituals of the households. These are pre-programmed so that you only need to touch one of the small single buttons to shift the lighting scene from morning Sharon shave to evening spar. Both controls like these can be incorporated into more ambitious programmable systems that also open and close curtains and blinds and control other aspects of household audio visual computer and security and access systems. Speak to specialists, suppliers to find out about the installation process and the space required for the various parts of these systems because the system might need additional parts beyond the fittings and switching controls themselves. 14. Kinetic And Decorative Lighting: So far we've looked at three categories of lighting, task, accent or feature and general. But there are a couple of others that I should mention. These are kinetic And Decorative. Kinetic light is probably my favorite. It's flickering and moving light. So fire light, candles and so on. And Decorative Lighting refers to fittings that have intrinsic beauty and personality in their own rights. Objects there to be enjoyed for their form and then materials, even when the lights are turned off 15. Daylight: In a class about lighting your home, it would be crazy not to stop for a moment and think about daylight. Daylight and how to make maximum advantage of this in your own home. Access to daylight, along with the effects that daylight can create, can be one of the great joys of your home, where strong shafts of light penetrate buildings. There are opportunities for shadow play and for drama. My camera, I endlessly chased daylight around my own home. Before you start thinking about artificial light, makes sure that you've analyzed and properly understood the journey of natural light through your home. This is going to be different at different times of the year and with the sun at different levels, and with sunset and sunrise also being at different times. In an ideal world where we don't always necessarily live, bedrooms would face west rather than east so that you aren't woken up by early light. Ideally, daylight, we provide some of the task light you need in your home. Lighting for the kitchen bench top, or giving light for shaving or putting on makeup, or flooding your desk with diffused light for working. However, most of us have to compromise, and in most cases, Perfect isn't possible. For example, I'd never shove the sitting area of my home into a dark corner just so that I could get my desk in front of the window. I choose to prioritize the sitting area, even if this means that now I have to work under a desk light. Do make sure that you've thought about the furniture layout and how it could be improved to maximize the benefits of natural light within your home. You should do this as part of any project to improve your home lighting. Also, if you have the good fortune to be involved in a much larger projects, take time to think about how increasing the size of Windows or relocating them, or puncturing through the building in different places, including creating roof lights could actually massively improve the quality of natural lighting in your home. So do make sure that you've thought about the furniture layout and how it could be improved to maximize the benefits of natural light within your home. And you should do this as part of any projects to improve your home lighting 16. Exercise Two: Optional exercise Two is to inspire yourself by following the work of top lighting designers. Here's a shortcut to finding great lighting design inspiration for your own residential project. Starts with an Internet search for lighting design awards. And to see the most relevant results, look for awards that are based in your home country. I like to keep an eye on awards like the lit lighting design awards. From an awards website. I can narrow down my search by clicking through to winners. Then often you can filter by sector. I'm most interested in residential design, but it's also worth looking at bars, restaurants, hotels and hospitality, where we can also maybe still some ideas for use in the residential environment. Now, information about winning projects usually carries fantastic profiles and images. Often you can link through to visit the websites of the winning companies. So for example, here from the lit awards site, I can link through to winning practice john colon. And John Curlin is a British company with a good number of case studies available on their website. They also provide product information that clearly explains how specific effects have been created. Take time to search the web for award winning lighting design. Then you can analyze projects, images, and workout what strategies have been applied. So you can count fittings and you can look at exactly how particular effects have been achieved. You can look at colour, Temperature, the Shape Of Light, and how general task, accent or feature lighting has been integrated into these winnings schemes, think about circuits and how dimming would allow mood to be changed in these spaces. Because often the photographs are taken with every single light on. So take a look at top-notch lighting design practice and then think about what you could take from this to use in your own home. 17. Living Rituals: If you were to work with a designer, so for example, an architect or an interior or garden designer. They would talk to you about your living Rituals, how you use your home. How many people gather there on different days, at different times? How the activities within your home changes throughout the week and throughout the seasons. A successful lighting solution must support all the users and functions of your home. If you're working on a project, get yourself a project notebook somewhere that you can collect your ideas and where you can sketch out the living Rituals of each room in question. Now, sketch of living Rituals might look like this, very rough. You might have one for weekdays, another for weekends, and you could color-coded. From this analysis, you have a solid foundation to develop ideas for general task and accent lighting 18. A Demonstration Of Painting With Light: In this lesson, I'm going to demonstrate one of my favorite ways of working out possible schemes of lighting for a room. I'm going to be working on top of a photograph. And I like to look at these in black and white because I find that this helps me to focus on the effects of lighting without being distracted by color or decorative scheme. The first example I'm going to work through is for a sitting room. I'm going to start by making a focal point in the center of the room. In a larger room, this can help to draw people into the middle and create a cozy huddle. There's a lamp already shown in this room and it's in a good location. Thinking about our goal of Layering lighting, providing light at different levels in the room. Then highlighting the artwork is a good next step in line with a Layering goal. We also want low-level light. So how about a floor standing spotlight? That costs interesting shadows through the leaves of the plants and up lights the corner of the room. On the near side of this room. We need more light to balance the scheme. So I'm going to pop a reading light at the end of the sofa. I'll finish up by painting a glow of light between the two near side arm chairs. In this way, I'm making sure that light is evenly distributed. So that's a very well-balanced spread of light in the sitting room. You can see a number of independent features. But you can see that the combination would also provide adequate general light as well. So what fittings could I use to achieve these effects? We need a Lamp between the armchairs. Maybe I'd put picture lights over the paintings. And there's already a lamp on the left-hand side. I'd pulpal floor standing up light into the far corner behind the plant. For the center table. We could drop a pendant light into the center of the room. But making sure that the height doesn't block the view of your friends across the room when you're sitting opposite each other. Alternatively, we could install a very narrow beam spotlight in the ceiling above the table. There's the opportunity for a reading light behind the sofa. So this is a process that you can use to resolve the lighting needs of any room in the home. Next up, we're going to look at another sitting room, but this time it's a much smaller space. In a smaller space, we have to be careful about how many lights we put in. If we have too many lights, we might lose the crisp impact of particular effects in the overall glare. There are lots of different approaches though that we could take. Let's start by making the Art, the focal point. We're layering our light. So I'm going to drop more into the corner up from the floor again behind the plant. And we could even have a glow of light leaking out from under the bench, floor washing. In a smaller room. One strategy to help increase the sense of space is to wash the walls with light, to visually push the walls out. I could do that by installing ceiling height linear light. And this could be supported by floor standing spotlights that push more light up the wall. Wall washing works because it draws the eye to the farthest points in the room. So this is one option. Or we could achieve a similar effects using recess down lights located very close to the back wall. Again, drawing the eye to the extremities of the room. Wall washing down lights are typically positioned about 15 to 30 cm or six to 12 " away from the wall. You'll probably have noticed that Creating canopies of light over a table is one of my favorite tricks. When I started to think about the fittings that might help make this a reality. Obviously, we're thinking about spotlights in the ceiling. Or we could also be thinking about some kind of pendant light hanging down over the table. It's easy to worry. The dependent light will block of you getting the way, particularly when you're looking at this in a static photo. But when you're in the room moving about, you get many different vistas. So pendants rarely block views and they're great for helping to zone and define space. I'm going to mare there's just a little more by also adding low-level lights in the corners. So you can see this is an iterative process and evolving and creative process. If the painting is important and we want to light it dramatically, narrow beam spot would do it. Or a picture light, or even a plug-in wall mounted Light? You can usually make concepts work as well by using temporary Light fittings. Here's another sitting room. I'm starting by highlighting the Art is a good size room and we don't want a hollow it out by focusing light only around the perimeter. So again, I'm dropping a glow into the center. There are some lights and the room already. So let's borrow this one to make a reading spot in the armchair. We're going to need task lighting over the piano keyboard. Can you see that our attention is very much focused in the lower areas of the room, the bottom half, to increase the sense overhead space, I could throw a bit of light onto the ceiling. It's a tall space and this helps to celebrate it. We could use narrow spot down lights close together and close to the wall to light the Art. We could install a plugin play pendant over the table. This is a great rental solution. Lighting doesn't always have to be physically installs and the space. Still thinking about rental or temporary solutions. We could use a floor standing spotlight to light the Art. If there was a shallow corners here to conceal it, we could cast linear light up into the ceiling. So here's a freestanding task light for the piano. Or we could warm ounce of fitting, a war light to shine, to shine down over the keyboard. The ceiling could be washed with light from a freestanding up lighter. Don't forget that with each lighting challenge, you need to accommodate the households living. Rituals. Work with circuits or groups of lighting and think about how you're going to use the space during the day. In the evenings and weekends. The lighting you need for food prep, lighting that you need for entertaining. In this kitchen. There's a textured wall of handmade tiles at the back. Washing light over this irregular surface would emphasize the artisanal nature of the product. You'd really appreciate the handmade quality of the tiles. It's a contemporary kitchen, linear and very simple. There's an argument here for using linear light. So let's put a length of linear light across the back above the tile surface, which we're dramatically flashlight across the surface of the tiles. Turning to think about circuits and assuming that this is a kitchen diner, the guests would also eat. And here, how about some dramatic lighting for the evening? Light that draws focus away from used pots and pans, and instead leads the eye to look at something beautiful And Decorative. I've mentioned this before, but I'm interested in making a focal point here, a glow at the end of the kitchen island. I think it could be a lovely feature to have a light available just for this. So that's the after-dinner relaxed mode. But what about task lighting? Task lighting would be on a different circuit. For Task purposes. We need to light the work top across the surface of the island. And I'm suggesting putting this on a separate circuit from the focal point or the feature at the far end. How would we actually make this concept worked for real? For the Decorative circuit, we could install a slinky slim line pendant that hangs down from the ceiling and serves only to light the installation or the objects at the end of the island, which could be vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit or whatever you fancy. The lighting over the work top. We know we could make pools of light using down lights and they'd obviously need to be located on the ceiling, or perhaps surface mounted as track lighting, given that we have beams and other ceiling details to navigate. And this would be on a separate circuit. At the end of the day, you could turn off the task lights and return the emphasis to the Decorative, even if there were a few dishes lying around having just served up a meal. Next, we're in a dining room. In this space. I'm going to maximize the impression of height by creating columns of light using the peers between the windows. Now, I've mentioned before I really liked to light tabletops because I feel that a lit canopy helps to draw people together. So how could we make this work? As far as the columns of light go? We could use up down lights wall-mounted, or we could pop spots in the ceiling to bring light down the peers. Similarly, we could drop spots in the floor to wash light up. If you're going to put Light fittings into the floor, just make sure that you check for heat information with the product. Because you don't want children, animals, or generally people to get burned feet over the table as this is a contemporary space. How about a linear pendant suspended from the ceiling and delivering a line of light the length of the table Again, pendants create the sense of a canopy, a safe space to huddle under. This draws people together in a social way. Looking at now as a bedroom, the last thing you want is a glare of overhead spotlight drilling directly into your eyes when you lie down and you look up. In this contemporary room, we could use linear lighting, install a line of light down the left-hand side to wash light across the wall behind the bad. If we mirrored this to on the right-hand side, we draw attention to the Bed Head wool. We'd make this wall the focal point of the room. Or instead, we could put linear light along the top of the wall to wash downwards. If you want to read Embed, then rather than choosing a badly positioned down light, it's much better to deliver light using a small and discreet fitting. Maybe a bendable swan necks light. This doesn't have to be expensive. Care, does this kind of things a clip on? Or you could pick opposable bedside light, one that can deliver reading light, but could also be angled away to throw light upwards and to create a general below in the room. Don't put a light here to shine down into your eyes. Finally, let's look at this whole space. I think it gives a great demonstration of how light can draw us through space, can help to lead us on our journey through a home. There's a tiny painting here in this hallway. And the impact of dramatically lighting this brightly using a pin spot is really going to pull people through the space. I'm using the column trick here again, emphasizing vertical height. I'm using the curtains to provide structure and texture. This lifts the eye up and celebrates the overall height in the room. This is a moody proposal. We've got areas of light but with significant gaps in-between, that would be Shadi and you could drop light in the left-hand side as well. Additional fittings where you think you'd have objects of particular merits or interest. Solving this suggestion could include another narrow beam spot, the same down the right-hand side in the ceiling above the curtain track. Just for a moment, I'd like you to imagine the lighting plan for this space. We're looking at a layout of spotlights that wouldn't conform to what an electrician might expect. Often, electricians like to work with grids have ceiling lighting. But here, there is a strong rationale for an asymmetrical approach, which makes sense when you think about how you'll actually use the space. If this was a rental property or not a candidate for a major electrical overhaul, we could light this whole using freestanding fittings. For example, a freestanding floor spotlight and a wall mounted plug-in lamp with an exposed cable running off to a nearby electrical socket. Light can often be applied as it's needed and moved around. And freestanding fittings give you the flexibility to change things up. So I hope you found this helpful, and I hope it shows that there are many different approaches, many different ways to tackle lighting that you don't need to chase into walls and ceilings to level up your home lighting. Please don't forget that the class notes include details, advice on the particular lighting solutions that work best for each room in your home. In the course notes, will find a room by room guide to inspire you with very particular approaches to lighting, depending on which room in the home you're going to be designing light for? 19. Exercise Three: When you're out and about, stop for a few moments to think about commercial lighting and its successes. Make notes and take photos. Take photos of the lighting effects themselves, but also of the fittings that are creating those effects. So for example, in the public areas of a shopping mall, take time to compare the impact of lighting that you see across a number of different facades. Now, fashion boutiques or a very good choice and particularly expensive brands because they tend to have a better budget for shop fitting and for merchandising. In other words, how products within the store are being presented. See how different levels and colours of light can create different moods and different stores. Some shops or grungy or trendy, whereas others are more minimal and bright and clean. Notice as well how light is used inside individual shops? How is bright light being used to attract your attention or to guide your journey? Have focal points being created. Can you see the Shape of light being used decoratively? Think about your favorite coffee shop or restaurant or bar. What draws you to this space? What features do appreciate the most? Where do you choose to sit? How has lighting help to achieve the ambiance that you particularly enjoy? Or if you go into a bar or restaurant that you don't like, what is it? That's a turnoff when you stop to analyze lighting and to think about how different lighting makes you feel. You guess ideas about how you could use light in your own home? 20. Survey Your Room : The first step in most interior design projects is to survey the project room. When I say survey, I mean Creating a rough plan and recording all of the measurements needed to draw up an accurate scale drawing of the space. If you have architect's drawings, you could use these. Although you really should check the measurements because buildings aren't always built exactly or accurately. If you don't have existing plans or if they're too small and you can't scale them up. Then Surveying the room is the first step in drafting your own plans. Step one, look around the room, notice it Shape and any nooks and crannies, any irregularities. Now this room is quite complex. It's got angles and alcoves. Step to. You'll need a few sheets of paper just to allow for mistakes. And squared paper is best along with a portable hard surface to work on. So, for example, a clipboard or book. Step three, draw an outline of the room in plan view as if you were looking down into the room from high up above. Try to make it roughly proportionate and make sure that every corner and detail is there. Normally I do this very lightly, first of all in pencil. And then when I'm happy with this, I draw over the pencil outline with a black pen. I draw the outline to fill the page, but I also need to leave space around this because in the next step, which is step four, I'm going to be adding dimension lines, usually two for each side of the room. One is for the overall dimension, the full width or length. And the second is for the incremental measurements that make this up. Once I'm done, I add up the increments to make sure that their total is exactly the same as the overall measurement that I've also taken. In this case, I've only got one line on the right-hand side because there aren't any details on this wall. It's just a plain straight run. In step five, I also add a few limited dimension lines within the plan to make sure that I capture any important details that would otherwise be missed out. So for example, details around the fireplace. Step six is the actual Measuring. In an ideal world, you'd have somebody along to help you. One of you would measure and the other one would record. But of course, you can also easily do this on your own. This example is in metric and in a minute, I'll show you an example in imperial. Watch out for cases where rooms aren't completely square, which actually is most of the time. If you have conflicting measurements, one bigger than one smaller, it's good practice always to use the smaller one because this helps you to avoid ordering anything that's going to be too big to fit in. So still on step six, Here's the imperial measurements example. Note that I've also recorded the ceiling height, so that's the dimension shown as CH in the center of the page for some uses of plans. So for example, if we're making a lighting plan, ordering flooring, It's also helpful to know the overall area of the room. And you can roughly work this out to. I've added this information in green. Here's a quick look again at the metric example. Step seven is to create some simple sketch elevations. These are two-dimensional, flat views of the walls just as you see them when you're standing inside the room. Now, the reason that I take these is they're very useful for getting a better idea of how the rooms going to look once the design details have been added. Also in the case of a lighting plan, or if you're Specifying or calculating materials. So furniture, paint, or wallpaper, you can use the elevations to show professionals the heights where you want installations to start and stop. The next step is to add dimensions to two. The elevations just the same as we did for the plan. So two sets, each side, overall height measurement and of course, the incremental details that gets us there. And I also take measurements of all the furniture in the room so that I can make movable templates for each piece. That way I can try out different furniture layouts without physically heaving heavy furniture around the room. For a lighting plan, you do need to have all your furniture sketched into the preliminary drawing so that you can ensure that you will general Task and Accent Lighting ends up in exactly the right locations. And voila, the survey is complete 21. Draw A Plan From Survey Notes: Here's how to convert your Survey Notes into a sketch scale plan for your room. To do this, you're going to need squared paper, a ruler, a pencil, and eraser, and a fine-tipped pen. You want your finished drawing to fill the sheet of paper to give you as much space as possible to draw your design ideas, you need to work out a scale for the drawing that will contain the overall dimensions of the room while making the drawing as big as possible. Here's an example. I'm working in metric, but of course you could follow the same process for imperial from the overall measurements I took when I surveyed the room, I know the maximum dimensions of the space. If I decide to make every square represent 25 cm, I can fit the outline of the room onto the sheet and with space to work up ideas. If I were working in imperial, I might choose, for example, to make each square worth 6 ". Once I've decided on my scale, I lightly mark the overall dimensions onto the sheet. Starting from the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet and counting upwards and to the right. Once the overall low outline is lightly indicated, I use the incremental measurements that I took and I mark these onto my drawing. Once these increments are being plotted, the true shape of the room begins to reveal itself and I can darken up the perimeter. When I'm sure that everything is exactly right. You can rub out the pencil markings to make a clean outline. But here I've redrawn the plan to make a neat master copy. Don't draw directly onto the master copy. Instead, it's better either to make photocopies of it and work on these. Or you can invest in some tracing paper or rollout or sheet of kitchen baking paper, the non-waxed type, over the top and trace your working documents, which allows you to keep the master copy pristine for most interior design applications. So for example, Planning, lighting or a decorative scheme. It's really important to add the furniture layout. And obviously when I surveyed this room, I also measured the furniture. And I use the same scale that I did for drawing the room, which in my case means every square represents 25 cm. I draw simple templates to represent the furniture. I cut these out and I use sticky tack or masking tape or some other temporary tape to hold them in place as I try out different layouts. When the furniture plan is finished, I can photocopy or trace the final version, and then I can use these copies is working drawings. You can use your furniture layouts to test colour combinations, or for example, as a template for lighting experiments, for painting with light 22. Plan Your Lighting: So now the funds starts, it's time to create the lighting scheme. We're going to use the furniture layout. The best practice is to forget all the existing lighting. If you can start the creative process from scratch with an open mind. I know in our households and i've, I've seen generally that most really good creative partnerships involve teams where some people are balloons. Creative, big idea, floating away people, whereas other people are string there. The practical pragmatist who grounds the balloons. So maybe in your household, you have balloon people and string people. Anyway, the first stage, this first stage is the stage for the balloons. Later on, we'll switch on the string brain, will revisit the plan and pull it back to meet budget and location restrictions. In the first instance. To get the very best outcome, it's good to dream big. So you can begin by working on photos of your room, maybe printed out actually in black and white, a bit like we did earlier in the class. Or you could work directly onto a copy of the plan. How are you work is going to be up to you. I'm going to show you the traditional method which uses tracing paper. But you could work on a photocopy of the furniture layout or anyone who's used to using Keynote, PowerPoint, Procreate Photoshop, Illustrator, or even free form could follow along using software. So here's the old school method. We begin with a furniture layout. We put tracing paper over this. Now, I tend to use kitchen baking paper, the non-waxed kind, because this is inexpensive and it's easy to find a cousin length that covers my plan. Usually I'll work on a non precious table top and I'll use some temporary sticking tape, like masking tape to hold the plan down and then additionally to hold the trace in place over the plan, I don't need to redraw the whole plan. Instead, I just mark the corners in case the two sheets gets separated with the corners drawn in, I can easily match them back up. Then on the tracing paper, I use a yellow pencil crayon or highlighter to indicate where I want to put night. I'm make sure that light is distributed well across the room. But there aren't so many fittings that they all blurred into one. Now here I'm working on a living room and from an earlier lesson than light level guidance tells us that we should aim for approximately 300 lux or 300 lumen per square meter. This room is 21 m², so 21 times 300 lux gives us a total target of just over 6,000. Lumen. Lamps tend to emit 300-800 lm per unit. So I'm going to be aiming for a range of 7-20 lamps depending on their intensity. I've worked out the living Rituals for this Room. I know that we need somewhere to read, so I need to put a reading task light somewhere close to the favorite readings spot. I think about the focal wool in this room, which is definitely the wall with a fireplace. I want to address this with feature light. So I pop this in. I test the allowance of general lighting, thinking about everything operating together. And I question myself whether this would be enough for cleaning and so on. I decide to add additional feature lighting. And this is in the Shape Of picture lights behind the sofa. To emphasize a collection of Art and to celebrate this. It's a good idea to draw in elevation as well. This allows you to go to trial the scale of any decorative fittings, dependent that I've drawn to me, looks proportionately correct for the space. But in reality, it could look enormous out of contexts. This is a very big fitting. Quite often when we choose fittings, we pick ones that are too small because we judge them in the shop. Instead of scaling them on a measure drawing. So it's a good tip to draw things in elevation. And that way you can also work out the height that you'd like to have things installed So here's a checklist. Use this to troubleshoot your lighting plan and make sure that it's been tested against all the vital criteria. Task lighting, What do you need? Have you put it in? Is it where it should be? Accent and feature? Have you put in some really interesting, exciting, and creative lighting solutions that add a bit of glamour to the space. General lighting. Is there enough to cover every possible eventuality, every need for lighting in the space? Have you made sure that you're lighting is layered when you look at it in elevation, can you see that it comes from different heights and different directions throughout the space? Have you checked the decorative fittings and made sure that they are appropriately scaled and that they're in the right place. Can you see that there should be interesting contrasts of light levels. So that between your light installations, there is some scope for a little bit of darkness. Does the space look like it would be appropriately cozy for winter and for evening times. Have you considered exactly how the space gets used at different times of the day and different times of the year to make sure that all the households has its needs for lighting covered for throughout the year. Okay, so now it's time to make a deeper critical review of the plan. What are the pros and cons of this particular solution? Ask friends for opinions, and of course, check with the people who also live in the space. Then it's time to bring back the inner string, the reality check how much of this is actually going to be possible and how much of it is affordable. It might be time now to think about creating a compromise version. Something that has elements of the balloon version, but it is a bit more based in reality. So now I'm going to cross check my Lumen count. Here's the rule of thumb guide, and here is the space weather. I'm working in metric Lux or in imperial Lumen per square foot, which is also known as foot-candles. I get to roughly the same total requirements. So a need for 6-7 thousand lm for this space. So I'm going to test the lamps that I have in mind for my various fittings. And I find that even without the shelf lighting, this is perfect Thumbs up and a green light for this plan. So keep going with a tracing overlays until you found a solution that works for your budget and location and achieves the best possible lighting outcome. Once you've worked out the very best lighting solution or the best compromise, it's time to formalize the scheme by drawing a sketch lighting plan. And that's what we're going to do in the next lesson. 23. Create A Sketch Lighting Plan: Once we've painted light throughout the space, it's time to figure out what kind of fitting would actually achieve the effect. And there are fittings for most applications, maybe recessed, built-in or surface mounted, depending on the advice that you get from your electrician. Let's look at an example. In this contemporary kitchen, you might decide to create a dramatic spot lit location at the end of the island where you would always plan to have a decorative object. So let's pretend that we want to paint light onto this object to make it appear like it's lit from within. One solution that would achieve this would be Planning a narrow beam spotlight. And the obvious location for this is directly above the decorative objects that you want to feature. To get to our final lighting plan, we use a form of reverse thinking, sort of reverse engineering to work out the best locations for fittings. You can see that in this example on plan, it might seem like quite a strange place to have a standalone fitting in the ceiling, but it makes perfect sense in terms of light within the space. Now, let's do a step-by-step reverse engineered lighting plan. This one is also for a kitchen, but for much smaller one. Here's the plan of the example kitchen. It's actually my old kitchen in my old house. The mid gray boxes are wool cupboards and the square on the bottom right is the fridge freezer. There is no point putting lighting in the ceiling over these areas because it would just bounce off the top of the cabinet tree, which is actually pretty close to the ceiling in this low ceiling space. In a kitchen. Obviously, you want to light the work top or the benchtop. So I'm going to paint light here first in the areas where it's possible to bring this down from the ceiling. But this doesn't cover the whole working area. So in addition, I'm going to pop some task lights under the wool cupboards as well. Check out the class notes to get advice on lighting different rooms in a kitchen. The best location for down lights over work tops is actually lined up with the edge of the work top. Here you can see I've dropped in three down lights, and these cover fairly large open areas of work surface. And they also skim light over the face of the fridge freezer. So these are doing the heavy lifting for general lighting in this room. I've created green colored symbols to represent down lights. And I've called this circuit of lighting, this group of lights, circuit a. I've made a different blue symbol for the under cupboard task lights. I've drawn these in the best location to put them, which is centered under each of the wall cupboards. And I'm calling this group circuit be. At the moment. The proposal is for pools of light, but of course, you could also work with lines of light. So here's what it would look like if we substituted linear tape light instead of spotlights as part of circuit, be. Coming back to the sitting room example. Here's the furniture overlay with the painted light suggestions. Here are typical symbols that are used on lighting plans to represent common types of fittings. It's now time to replace the painted Light solution with symbols for actual fittings that would achieve the effects that we want. So it's back to the tracing paper or the baking paper, or to whichever software you'd prefer to use for this exercise, I'm adding more registration marks which would let me match my lighting overlay with my furniture plan. If they drifted off, we go popping in symbols to represent fittings that would make the lighting scheme work. It's always better to use geometry rather than centimeters or feet and inches when this is possible. So in this drawing, the blue dotted line, which is marked as C, L, stands for center line, meaning the dead center of the fireplace. And oops, now I can see that I hadn't quite drawn the main pendant light to line up with the chimney breast. Can you see that this really needs to be adjusted if we're going to have the perfect solution. But here's a really important point. Don't force fittings into symmetrical layouts. If this drops the light into the wrong part of the room, the effects of light within the room is much more important than a symmetrical layout of fittings in the ceiling. Now, unless you tell your electrician what height to install your lights, they're going to decide for themselves and you might not get what you expected. So you always need to specify the drop of a pendant in plan or elevation. And the same for heights of wall lights. And the heights that we put War lights varies depending on the ceiling height of the room. It's always a good idea to sketch this in, but also to think of the eye level of people who are going to be using the space. The process of replacing Conceptual painted light with symbols that represent actual fittings is how we move to the real-world solution. The electrician doesn't need to know about your furniture. And it makes the plan clearer when we separate the trace overlay from the furniture layout. One of the final steps in producing a sketch lighting plan that you can discuss with your electrician is to add any critical dimension information. For example, adding that the pendant must be centered on both the fireplace and the bay window. That the lamps on the mantelpiece, we'll both be an identical distance from the center line. Dimensions are provided for the spacing of the picture lights and for the height to locate them on the wall, which is described as being a distance from F, F, L, or finished floor level. Looking again at the plan for the small kitchen. On this plan, we actually indicated circuits as well to circuits. Circuits and circuit be with each fitting marked according to the group that it belongs to. So don't forget that you have to give the electrician a copy of the key that shows all of the symbols used on the plan. And you could include terms like CL, will, center line, and ffill for finished floor level. Just to be absolutely clear. 24. Switches And Schedules: Now we need to look at how we're going to control our lighting. We also show switches on lighting plans. Here are some examples symbols for switches. You could adopt unfilled symbols to show simple on-off switching. And then fill the same symbols to indicate when you want to use a dimmer switch. We add our symbols to the plan in the hoped for location, unmarked as well, according to the circuit that they control, if this is relevant information. That's it. You're sketch lighting plan is finished. It's time to have that second chat with your electrician. Reminder chat one was onsite walking the project in the very early stages, guessing advice on what was possible and what was recommended. A sort of collaborative chat, mixing Inspirational and practical ideas and making sure that the outcome that you get is creative. But it's also one that sits comfortably with the constraints of sight and budget. The second chart is a discussion about the plan that you've created, getting it sense checked by an expert, and making sure that your team of professionals agree the solution is a good one. At this stage, it's also good opportunity to ask your electrician to suggest any budget saving changes or alternatives. Okay, So I'd like to show you one more document and it's called a lighting schedule. It's basically a shopping list or a spreadsheet that contains all the fittings and parts that you need for your projects. Here's an example. It helps with budgeting and budget control. It helps monitor deliveries to site. And when you share it with your electrician, it helps to ensure that you get the right fitting installed in the right place. A clear lighting plan is also a great tool to take to the specialist supplier to show the team they are in the shop, what you have in mind, and ask them to recommend the best fittings to do the job, and not forgetting to ask about transformers. If it's possible to dim these installations and to look at any specialists lamps that might be available along with any Accessories 25. The Design Process: Our process has been dream big about Your Lighting. Take photos of your room, or make a sketch plan and paint light onto surfaces to achieve generous task, accent and general Light. Try lots of different recipes of light and compare these solutions against the living Rituals of your household. Take the combination of lighting that works the best in your home. Convert this to a sketch lighting plan by substituting symbols to represent the actual fittings that would do the job you want. In the last couple of lessons, I spoke about working with an electrician to install a new scheme of lighting in your home. What happens when you rent your home or when you don't currently have the budget for a big renovation projects. The first stages of the process are exactly the same. Dream big, come up with great conceptual ideas to improve your home lighting. But then, instead of building in a fitted solution, choose portable lamps that create minimal upheaval that you can pack up and take with you when you move home. These are the lamps we're going to look at in the next lesson. 26. Short-Term Solutions And Rented Homes: If you rent your home or if you aren't ready to commission a big renovation projects at the moment, then in this lesson, we're going to be looking at simple lighting hacks. We're going to look at three different types. First of all, we'll think about changing your lamps or your light bulbs. Secondly, we'll be looking at modestly altering existing installations. But of course you might need landlord permission for some of these. Then finally, we'll look at transportable fittings that you could invest in. Light fittings that you can permanently own and that could move home with you. A key message of this class is that you can overhaul Your Lighting simply by changing light bulbs or lamps as we know them. Lamps alone can transform a lighting scheme. The very first analysis of any home lighting should be if the existing fittings, looking at how upgrading lamps could make a significant difference. Look at the options for dimming. And this is going to bring us onto a category of lamp that we haven't actually looked at yet. And that is smart lamps. In this room, we have three unconnected fittings. And each of these fittings has got a different lamp installed. Each fitting is operated by its own independent switch. When we replace lamps with smart or intelligent lamps or smart bulbs shown here with the S. We get to choose and change the color temperature of the whole group. We can denote them as if they were a circuit, but they don't have to be connected using cabling. We can program set scenes, for example, one called relax or another, to give us a boost of energy. We use voice commands plus a smart speaker or an app on a smartphone to control all of the lighting together as if it were a circuit. In the UK, the Philips Hue smart bulb is just such a products. The range includes Lance for many different types of fittings. Lamps that you could then control as if they were on the same circuit. They could save you from having to get any remedial work done at all. You may not own the property or the Light fittings, but you can own the land. So you can put the old ones back and take your expensive investment lamps with you when you move. So that's our first category. A second line of attack would be to check out what might be tolerated or even funded by your landlord. For example, lengthening the cable on a pendant to allow that pendant light to loop to a different position in the room. Replacing on-off switching with dimmer switches. And of course, checking that these are compatible with the fittings that they run. Buying new fittings to improve the lighting in the home. Investing in very modest extensions of existing cabling and circuitry. So for example, that might include putting new down lighting under kitchen wall cupboards to light work tops, or installing up lights along the top of kitchen wall cupboards to bounce diffused light of the ceiling. You could add further pendant lights to a circuit or install an illuminated mirror with an integrated switch in a bathroom. Finally, you can think about investing in transportable fittings. When you paint light into a scene and you decide on the specific effects that you want to create. Chances are there's a freestanding product that would put that light exactly where you need it. So let's look at some examples of free-standing or minimal damage solutions that could bring light into the nooks and crannies of your Rented Homes. Rented home. The Design Process is exactly the same. First, forget all about the existing lighting and use either photos or a Plan view of the space to creatively paint light into the scene. Then use the three strategies from this lesson, which are changing lumps in existing fittings, negotiating small improvements with the landlord, or buying transportable fittings, and carefully matching these two perfect lamps. Find ingenious ways to bring light into the volume and to mimic the effects you were hoping to achieve when you created your Conceptual painted light exercise? 27. Conclusion: At the end of the class, it's really helpful to reflect on what we've learned, our new understanding of a subject. We started this class with a mission statement, and here it is again. What can we now say about each of the five points on this list? You now know how to measure light, how much light you need in the various rooms in your home, and how to calculate the number of lamps you should install. You now know that you should layer light. You need to find three dimensional modeled solutions rather than relying on a one dimensional ceiling pendant. You've learned to paint with light, to cross check the distribution of light through a space. You've mastered the shape of light creatively, washing, outlining, and dotting with accuracy. Based on the floor plan of your home, you know how to draw attention to your home's finest features. How to calculate the spread of light. How to mix dramatic, tight spots of light with more generous floods of light. And how to avoid blowing first impressions on mismatched white light or dead flat, colorless light. You know that lamps that are buried more deeply within a fitting will produce less glare. And that accessories can soften the edges of light. That sight lines and view should be considered and that heights of locations and fittings should always be clearly specified. Light your home sensitively based on an analysis of the habits and rituals of your household. The hardest working areas of your home can flex between strong, local punches of light, and beautiful and glowing softer circuits. You know how to share your plans for all of this in drawn and written format for discussion with professionals. Finally, you also know that everyone has the power to improve their home lighting, whether your home is forever or just for the moment. I want to thank you for taking the time to complete this lighting design master class. I'm so excited about the opportunities for beautiful home lighting and I hope that you found the class informative and inspirational. If you have, please do share any aspect of your home lighting transformations in the project area. I would love to see your ideas and your successes. Please do leave a review and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I'll see you on Instagram where I am at Recipe For A Room.