Love your lighting

By Leah A. Zeldes, Tribune Content Agency

Furniture, flooring and wall coverings are physical as well as visual elements in your home decor, but one critical element in your home design is for your eyes only: Light.

"There are a lot of different categories of lighting," says Syril Lebbad, a designer for Baer's, a collection of fine furniture stores with 15 locations throughout Florida. "I'm a big believer in using different kinds of lights," she says.

The three main types of lighting are ambient lighting, general all-over illumination, such as a ceiling light or chandelier; task lighting, typically brighter lights directed toward a specific purpose, such as a desk or reading lamp, and accent lighting, which adds drama, as does under-cabinet lighting or picture lights.

Architect and lighting designer Joe Rey-Barreau, education director for the American Lighting Association, says, "The key to good lighting is variety."

The best lighting design, he says, involves layering multiple types of light. Rather than a single, bright overhead light, you might have several lamps, some wall sconces, and some accent lights or recessed lights, "so you have a variety of means to change the lighting for different purposes," he says.

For example, when you're cleaning the room or working, you might want very bright lights shining down from the ceiling, but most often, Rey-Barreau says, "We like light closer to us, to bring the scale down to eye level." Bright lights directly overhead create uncomfortable shadows, he says.

He advises expanding the light to cover different parts of the space. "You need to have multiple sizes of lamps," Rey-Barreau says.

According to Lebbad, "The height of your lamp is as important as where you put it." Lamps and shades should be set so the light is directed where you need it.

For example, if you have an easy chair where you sit to read, the light should be directed toward where your book would be, "so you can actually sit and enjoy that area," Lebbad says.

Do you read in bed? Then bedside lamps or sconces should shed light on the bed rather than your nightstand. "It's not good design if it isn't functional," she says.

Don't overlook natural lighting, a key part of the ambient light during daylight hours. Lebbad notes. "That is critical — getting the right window treatment," she says. Let the sunshine in when you want it, but use light-filtering shades or blinds to control harsh lights, create privacy and keep sunlight from damaging fabrics.

Along with the types of light and the fixtures that provide them, another important element to lighting is the light itself.

New FTC regulations require that light bulbs be more energy efficient, Rey-Barreau says, but technology continues to advance in that direction so you can have the same sort of comfortable lighting provided by old-fashioned incandescent bulbs in new, more efficient forms, including halogen incandescent bulbs, LEDs and compact fluorescents. These light bulbs are more expensive than the old-style bulbs, he says, but they also last longer, as well as using less electricity.

If you've been hoarding incandescent bulbs, you needn't. Contrary to what some people believe, light from the new-technology light bulbs isn't intrinsically ugly — people who think so need to choose them more carefully, according to Rey-Barreau "They'll pick the wrong color and think, 'This is terrible light.'"

When selecting bulbs, the "Lighting Facts" label on each package is your guide to navigating range of choices, he says. Among other details, information on the label includes a scale showing the bulb's "color temperature," or "light appearance," on a scale in degrees Kelvin from 2,600 K (warm) to 6,600 K (right), as well as its brightness in lumens. These are the two most important items from a design standpoint.

Old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, Rey-Barreau says, are 2700 K, the warm, comfortable, slightly yellow light most of us are used to, but CFL and LED lights often run 4000 to 5000K, which is very bluish. "Manufacturers describe that as 'daylight,'" Rey-Barreau says, "which sounds good, but they mean north light, the color of the sky." He notes that what temperature people prefer is subject to cultural and geographic considerations. Northerners like lower temperatures, which are perceived as warmer, while in the South, bluer, high-temperature light, which seems cooler, is more popular.

"You don't want to mix color temperatures in the same room," Rey-Barreau says. "It looks funny."

While wattage indicates how much energy a bulb uses, lumens measure its brightness. We're used to equating watts with brightness, but the new, more energy efficient bulbs use fewer watts to achieve the same brightness. A standard 100-watt bulb is 1600 lumens bright; the newer bulbs draw only 20 to 26 watts for the same brightness and, Rey-Barreau says, they're getting more efficient all the time.