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Home Decorating Guide How To Choose The Best Lighting For Your Home

From wall sconces and table lamps to chandeliers and task lighting, this Home Decorating Guide shows how to choose the best lighting for your home.

Lighting has the power to either make a space feel instantly warm and inviting or dark and dreary, depending on the type of lighting that’s chosen. That’s why it’s especially important to find the best lighting for various parts of your home and for different purposes, ranging from your living and dining rooms to your bedroom and home office. Featured here are interior decorating tips to help you find the best lighting for each room in your home.

How To Choose The Best Lighting For Your Home

Since lighting is infrequently purchased and installed in your home, it’s best to start by planning your budget and figuring out your goals for each room. As lighting can often get expensive, take your time to find the right fixtures and look at them as investment pieces.

Lighting For A Home Office:

If you’re updating the decor in your home office, think about the type of tasking you’ll often be doing (reading, writing, or computer work), as this will help determine the type of task lighting you’ll need.

Recessed lighting not only offers a modern, streamlined look (as the cans are installed directly into the ceiling), it also provides ample overhead lighting for functional rooms, like offices. To adjust the intensity of the bulbs (when you want to relax), have your electrician install a wall-mounted dimmer switch, to easily raise and lower the light level. To ensure you aren’t straining your eyes when doing work, a desk lamp helps shine light on important paperwork, without cluttering your work space.

Lighting For A Dining Room:

When it comes to choosing the right lighting options for your dining room, ask yourself what type of atmosphere and decor you want the room to evoke – contemporary, retro, traditional, glamorous?

A chandelier placed directly above your dining table instantly adds a sophisticated touch to your space. Whether you’re on the hunt for a dramatic crystal chandelier or an understated, rustic pendant, there are a number of styles available on the market, designed to suit a variety of decor themes. Relative to hanging your chandelier, Pottery Barn’s design experts advise, “for the standard 8-foot ceiling, hang your chandelier so that the bottom of the fixture falls 30 to 34 inches above your dining table.”

Lighting For A Bedroom:

Since the bedroom is most often your place for rest and relaxation, it’s best to opt for soothing lighting. In addition to choosing softer colored bulbs and lampshades (that have a warmer tonality), you’ll want to minimize the amount of space that the lighting takes up, since it can make your bedroom feel much smaller than it is. For these reasons, wall sconces (flanking your bed) and floor lamps (in a corner of your room) are great for bedrooms.

As Lynne Stambouly (an expert lighting designer) shares in Your Home magazine (Vol. 4, Issue 1), “simply changing one fixture, such as a dining room chandelier, or adding some pendants in your kitchen can change the whole atmosphere of the space.” For this reason, it’s important to find lighting that not only boosts the ambiance of your home, but also reflects your design aesthetic as well.

[Image credit: Shutterstock. Affiliate links included.]

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