"How to" Choose the Right Lighting

Helena Hubbard
Feb 7
3 min read

Choosing the right lighting can be essential to the final look of your home, and directly impacts how your home makes you feel.

Let's see what type of lighting you should be choosing, depending on the space you're working with!

Location, location, location

Now, choosing the right lighting all depends on what room you're working with:

If you're thinking of your living room, as well as your main lights, table or floor lamps are the way to go. For a space that you often use to unwind and relax, having interchangeable lighting options is a must! Lamps allow you to section areas of your space, so if you're tucked into a corner with a good book, having a little side table lamp on makes the space feel even cosier.

Whichever lamp you choose, make sure the bulb has a warm hue!

We could go on and on, but we have a whole blog dedicated to how we style our living rooms, you can read it here.

For a bathroom, the last thing you want is lamps in a wet room and hard floors... most of us opt for spotlights in our bathrooms so they are out of the way but still provide a decent amount of light.

I'm not here to reinvent the wheel, but you could also put in some accent wall lights by your mirror if you have the space, like the example below. You don't want to have to get up in the night and put on your blasting spotlights, it might take a little longer to go back to sleep than you'd like! Having low-level lighting always helps to relax the body.

Or, if you don't have to space, why not introduce dimmer spotlights or get a bathroom mirror that has lighting behind it?

I know we are just discussing artificial light in this blog, but if you are lucky enough to build in large windows (depending on your neighbours!) or skylights in your bathroom, natural light can invite such a wonderful start to your day. I mean, just look at how beautiful this example is:

In your kitchen, it helps to have multiple lighting options. Growing up, our kitchen had 3 options: spotlights on the ceiling, LED strips under the cabinets and spotlights in the glass cabinets. Now, you do not need all three to have the best lit kitchen, but I found that having options helps depending on the times you use the room.

Similar to the bathroom: at night, if you need to grab a glass of water, you can just turn on the cabinet strips; most nowadays come with light intensity options too, so you can choose either white light or warm light. This means you can get in and out, without making your body think its time to wake up!

Now, if you're looking for a 'wow-factor' item in your kitchen, and you have an island, maybe consider using the space to incorporate some large pendants overhead. They look great when hosting parties, and will definitely become a topic of conversation.

Many people would overlook putting such a design choice in their home, but it really is a great opportunity for beautiful design.

The only thing you would have to consider is how large your space really is!

Bedroom lighting has a huge impact on how we sleep, studies have shown that having a lighting range between 4000K - 6500K can keep our bodies more awake. We are more likely to relax around lighting with a kelvin range of 2000K - 3000K, so check your bulbs!

We'd suggest your bedroom lighting include options that allow you to control the intensity of the light, so adding a wall light to your bedside tables with a dimmer switch will help you to feel more relax, and save you table space!

More recent studies have suggested that the light intensity it actually more important to help us relax than the colour itself (Brown, 2019). This lighting even boils down to our phone screens before we go to bed, so be sure to put your phone on night mode a couple of hours before you sleep.

My personal favourites

So where can you find these fabulous options? I've cherry picked some of my personal favourites for each room:

Living Room