It’s amazing what good lighting can do. Besides making you look more attractive, it can be energizing, relaxing or simply illuminating — accentuating a room’s best features, minimizing the unsavory and making your home a more enjoyable living and entertaining space.
Judith Capen, an architect at Architrave Architects in Washington, said there are plenty of inexpensive sources of light that are plenty effective. Here are just a few:
• Fluorescent fixtures, which can be harsh, are great when used indirectly. “Put them on top of cabinets where you don’t see the fixture,” she said. Consider fluorescents on top of an armoire, or a tall bookcase, anywhere the source is unseen.
• Puck lights — little, round, battery-powered LED disks that require no wiring, are handy for inside cabinets, under shelves and in dark corners. “It’s not about an expensive fixture, but what you can do with it to shape a space,” Capen said.
• Task lighting. This is for when you need to brightly illuminate your desk, your closet, your kitchen counter, or your bathroom mirror so you don’t slice your throat shaving.
• Accent or directed lighting highlights objects in a room.
• Ambient lighting is t is indirect, and the light source is either invisible or insignificant. Examples are cove lighting at the top of a wall, or matte-black metal torchieres that simply throw light into a space, or uplights that sit on the floor behind large plants and create shadow patterns across a ceiling.
Too often our homes look their best only when they’re put on the market for sale.
“Lighting is an easy, cheap and simple way of updating the look of virtually any room in your house,” said real estate agent Ryall Smith of Coldwell Banker in Washington.
“Most kitchens, for example, have only overhead lighting,” he said. “Buy two small lamps and put them in corners, or maybe one in the dark triangle behind the sink, or on a stretch of granite counter. .”
And, note: If you don’t want your guests to congregate in the kitchen during a party, turn on those little lamps and turn off the overhead.
