How to Light a Modern Bedroom
How to Light a Modern Bedroom
These days there are very many ways of lighting a modern bedroom, and the best advice is to vary your approach and don’t rely on just one predictable yet boring light source. Below are some great ideas that can help you to radically change the ambiance and vibe of your bedroom so that it feels like an altogether different space.
The More the Merrier
The best way to create an engaging and intimate mood in your bedroom is to opt for multiple light sources. As well as the traditional lampshade and bedside string lights, there are many other options, from ambient, to ‘task’, to ‘accent’ lighting. By using a range of these you can alter the feel of your room at will. It will also be possible for you to match the lighting of your bedroom to your particular mood and the time of day. Glaring light might be useful for reading, but it might irritate when watching a movie.
Ambient Lighting
If you don’t have the budget to replace your windows to much larger ones or the funds to install skylights, your best choice is to insert ceiling fixtures. A flush mount ceiling light can come in many different shapes, sizes, and textures, while chandeliers have endless different designs, and pendant lights can be both elegant and useful for reading a book or magazine. Floor lamps can create a sense of intellectual chic and can alter your room to one of focused, modern energy. They can achieve a more retro effect if that is what is desired.
Task Lighting
Task lighting is useful for more focused activities; anything that requires concentration and finer detail, from reading to make-up and everything in between. Bedside table lamps or wall-mounted sconces have come on a lot since the days of your grandparents. These days they come in sleek, metallic designs, adding that sense of professional aspiration, or you could create a statement by having two or three stylish sconces tactfully poised above your head, which look like friendly beacons at night.
Accent Lighting
Now we’re talking. This is where your inner artist can come out. Accent lighting is not strictly necessary, although it will alter the mood and change the atmosphere, much like in a high-end hotel. Recessed lighting is unobtrusive, burrowed into the structure of the wall, while tape lights might create more of a futuristic, disco effect. They can illuminate the crooks and crannies of your bedroom, and thus create the illusion of having more space.
Dimmers
Dimmers are great in terms of having a multi-purpose light source, and they of course can change with your changing routines. For example, while vacuuming you might turn it up to the max, but when waking up at 5 am it might be on the minimum setting. There are those times, too, when you don’t want a full glare but you do want to do the crossword or read the newspaper on a lazy weekend morning.
Bulb
So much depends upon having the right bulb, check out our best smart light bulb, and there are many to choose from in this day and age. The brightness, or ‘lumen’, will depend on what you will want to be doing most of the time, while certain bulbs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) don’t work so well with a dimmer function. Then you may consider the element of color, in which halogen bulbs often create a white glow, CFLs a blue aura, and LEDs a more complete range. Your choice of bulb is almost as important as your choice of light fixture, or the design; metallic, wooden or other, of the device into which the bulb is going.
Make a Statement
Your lighting doesn’t have to be completely uniform. An old-fashioned floor-lamp inherited from your uncle might nicely off-set a fashionable, modern Danish pendant lamp. Or a green casino lamp might add some dramatic flair to your bedroom desk, which might be complemented by a soft 1960s hanging ball, or Chinese hand-knitted bamboo pendant light.
Your bedroom is your most intimate and private space. It is to your home what your home is to the world, and the golden rule is that the more lighting options you have the better.