How to add lighting to your living room using wall lamps

 

Lighting plays a very important role in modern house decor. No matter what you have made of your rooms and what you have furnished them with, it is their lighting that ultimately determines whether your work has been success or failure. Every interior designer will confirm that illuminating a room properly is just as important as furnishing it in the first place.

Statistically, it is the living room where people spend most of their waking hours at home. It also happens to be the part of the house that your visitors see most and judge you by too. In other words, your living room is your comfort zone and your public face at the same time, which makes the question of lighting it properly crucial indeed.

In this article, we shall introduce some basic ideas concerning different types of lighting and provide some useful tips on how to exploit them more effectively, with a special focus on wall lighting. We shall also consider the choice of furniture as another significant part of interior design, particularly in conjunction with the choice of illumination.

Types of room lighting

There are different ways to light a room, depending on how you would like to feel there and what you intend to use it for. This is particularly important when you think of your living room, where you may hold a business meeting with your subordinates in the day, throw a house party for your friends in the evening and choose to have an easy or romantic late night candlelight dinner with your spouse afterwards.

There are three basic types of room illumination, namely ambient, task and accent lighting. By skillfully exploiting the advantages of each type, you can make your living room an ideal place for any occasion. Let’s have a brief look at each type.

• Ambient lighting

Also called background lighting, it provides general, even layer illumination of the entire room by means of ceiling light fitting, spotlights and wall lamps. As this type of lighting tends to set the general atmosphere, it helps a lot if you can control it with a dimmer switch, to be able to change its intensity from bright to subtle.

• Task lighting

This type is used for illuminating a particular area when some task requires additional lighting. A table lamp or a movable wall lamp generally serves the purpose. The main factor to consider is, whatever you use for task lighting, it should be adjustable.

• Accent lighting

The third type is also known as mood lighting since it serves to modify the room’s atmosphere by adding visual effect and drawing attention to particular objects. It is most commonly achieved with wall lamps, table lamps and niche lighting. Accent light helps create a cosy and calm atmosphere in the living room. Wall sconces serve the purpose especially well as they help focus the light as well as serve a decorative function.

The most obvious and practical solution is to have all three in order to make your living room perfectly suitable for any purpose. The question is exactly how to provide each type of lighting. Generally, people look at the ceiling when they think of light, but they may also experiment with table or floor lamps. What they tend to ignore is the walls, which is why we shall have a closer look at wall lighting.

Wall lamps and sconces

Ideal lighting combines the effects of ceiling lights and wall lamps to create depth and underline the atmosphere of the living room. Wall lamps also help you free some space in the room, on the shelves and tables, and you may move around the room more freely too.

It is always better to have wall lamps with adjustable rams. They make it possible to focus the light in the needed direction, and even when you don’t use them, they still point towards an intended area if you position them properly. In other words, besides the additional lighting effects that wall lamps create, they provide a more directional perspective in your home decor.

An interesting alternative to a wall lamp is a wall sconce, which is an attractive light fixture that is positioned slightly out of the way and provides indirect illumination for the entire area. It is generally not adjustable though, so your choice between a sconce and a lamp will depend on what you intend to use the room for, or you may choose to have both options.

But whatever you do, it is always a good idea to mount a sconce or a wall lamp above the eye level: this way, it will provide better illumination, stay out of your direct visual field and make the room look more spacious too.

The light and the furniture

Finally, we should add that the sort of lighting you need arrange depends on what you would like to illuminate. Your choice of furniture simply makes no sense without considering the type and texture of the light in the room, and vice versa.

As a rule, a modern living room is designed and furnished around one central piece, the sofa, which gives the latter a supreme structural significance. In fact, it is the modern sofa that occupies the largest part of virtually any online or brick-and-mortar furniture shop. Its position, design and colour, therefore, should be considered in conjunction with the type of illumination in the living room.

Besides, anybody walking into the room will immediately be affected by its lighting, and the first thing the person will probably think of is where to sit, which usually happens to be the sofa. Your choice of both will determine what the person feels and thinks about you and your home. We could almost say that the lighting and the sofa are the two main ingredients that the entire interior design of your living room stands or falls with.

Summary

Lighting is one of the most significant aspects of the interior design of your living room, and wall lamps provide many additional and interesting options for creating extra convenience as well as a particular atmosphere inside. Your personal combination of various types of lighting depends on what you would like to do in your living room and the particular furniture that you choose for it. Whether you adjust your lighting to your furniture or vice versa, it is absolutely certain that the two should and will work together.