BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

Anna Burles, of design studio Run For The Hills, offers lighting design advice for style and practicality

Plan ahead to ensure you position spotlights in useful places – where you need bright light for tasks or to highlight a piece of art, furniture or architectural detail. And avoid arranging them in a grid formation throughout a room.

Include a mix of side lamps, table lamps, overhead pendants and floor lamps to create layered pools of light.

Consider light, temperature and colour before you decide on a particular fitting. With LED lights, the standard code for ‘warm white’ lamps is 3000K or 3000K Kelvin, but there’s an even warmer toned lamp, the 2700K, which looks closer to the candlelight warmth of a traditional tungsten lamp.

Do your research when it comes to bathrooms and wet rooms, which require specially rated fittings and lamps. For instance, not all fittings have to be IP65 rated. It’s the proximity to water that determines the rating.

If installing a mood-lighting control panel is beyond your budget, simply put all of the side lamps and floor lamps in a room on a 5-amp circuit, so you can control them with a single good quality dimmer switch for an instant ‘mood control’ effect. This creates pools of light throughout the room at the flick of one switch and saves you having to turn each lamp off at the end of the night.