Elegant Lighting Solutions For Your Home

Bill Gates is reputed to have spent $10 million on purely lighting fixtures for his $100 million mansion. Even if your budget doesn’t quite fall in the same league, there is a huge variety out there when it comes to acquiring the right lighting solution for your dear home.Before you make a decision on the shopping floor, do your homework and decide the function of the room you are planning the lighting for. How spaces are used in houses has changed over time, and even if you are living in an ancient mansion, your current usage of a particular room may not match with the occupants over the centuries! And as the usage changes, so does the lighting style. A living room, for example, may be a very formal area in some households, while the same may be the hub of all household activities in others – the lighting would vary accordingly.So where do you start? Let us work on the basics before we go on to the essential details.Assuming you have bought a new house, let us see what it has to offer in terms of options. Of course a new house is the easiest to plan out, as planning for it is like painting on a blank canvas - the world is your oyster. Extravagant lighting solutions can overshadow expensive furniture while the reverse holds equally true - tastefully done good lighting can well make even ordinary furniture look very classy. Again – money saved is money earned – so you would save a fair amount besides the glances of admiration and oodles of praise that your styles will draw.Let us start with that most important of places – the dining room. “You need good lighting in this portion of the house to first satisfy its basic function – see the food laid out on the dining room table,” says Robert White, a New York based interior designer. Use halogen lights to highlight the tabletop, and improve the ambience of those dishes that have taken so much of time and effort in the kitchen. Try a pair of hanging lights rather than a single one so as to evenly distribute the light over the whole table.For the overall lighting of the room and to bring out the best in the dining room furniture, use soft, non-glare wall lights in white or a color to compliment your walls and overall decor. A dining room hutch can be lit with small, concealed lights which, besides highlighting your expensive display items, would also add to the depth of the room.In houses that have a common dining cum living room, lighting can be effectively used to separate out the two portions. Use different color lights in the dining and living areas to distinguish them. A dimmer works well to add an inexpensive option of varied lighting themes with the same lighting to suit your mood. They may not work with CFLs and florescent lighting, but adding a bulb here and there with a dimmer may not add prohibitively to your electricity bill, while it would definitely do wonders to the ambience. If you are a die-hard fluorescent fan, use mood lighting instead.In part two of this article we will see more options to decorate other parts of the house.