Manhattan Home Design's Lighting Guide: Ambient lighting

This is the second part on our series dedicated to lighting. Here we’ll talk about ambient or general lighting, which should’ve been the first part of the series, probably. Ambient lighting is usually overhead lighting used to illuminate an entire room. It is the most common (and sometimes the only known) method for illuminating a space. Some people believe that choosing a good looking ceiling lamp is the only thing you need to do in order to create good ambient lighting, but this is not the case. Ambient lights affect how your space looks greatly, and will definitely affect how you experience it.

In many cases, for example, it is preferable to consider smaller lights, placed strategically around a room to avoid certain issues. Ambient lighting tends to be much stronger than task and accent lighting, which means that relying on it for all of our daily activities can lead to a disruption of your sleep pattern, for example. A room’s primary source of light will probably always be a ceiling ambient light, though there are exceptions. Another point to consider is that ambient lighting doesn’t have to come from a single source. Some of the best solutions include setting up an array of smaller fixtures in order to comprehensively light up an entire room.

How to work with and seize ambient lighting

The most important aspect of ambient lighting is that it will definitely set up the mood of your space. If the room is too bright the colors will look more vibrant, and the overall mood will be less heavy. A lot of general lighting makes a room seem bigger and more flexible, but it can get to be too energetic and overwhelming. That is why many people choose to relegate ambient lights to the main area of their space (i.e., a living room), while keeping the other rooms on the space less illuminated.

On the other hand, a darker room will make your space feel somewhat smaller than it actually is, but that doesn’t have to be negative. In fact, darker rooms can feel cozier, calmer. Low lighting is great for relaxation and warmth. Try not to get prejudiced about keeping certain lights from certain spaces, a common misconception in amateur interior design is that everything needs to be illuminated, and that dark spaces are bad and you should avoid them at all costs. Besides, some people are very photosensitive, and that’s alright.

Natural light (the one that comes from the Sun) is also a very important part of ambient lighting. You always need to take natural light into consideration because it might be everything you need sometimes. Other times, natural light won’t be enough to properly illuminate your space. One good way to counter a lot of natural light is via window treatment. This means putting a transparent foil on your windows, much like you would do with your car windows.

One piece of advice about ambient lights: always try to use warm light (incandescent bulbs) whenever you can for ambient lighting. You can save fluorescent light for the bigger spaces in your house. Warm light feels more natural to us as human beings, and it promotes relaxation. On the other hand, cool light will energize you, but can get weary after a while. Workplaces tend to use fluorescent light only because it keeps you awake and productive, but you don’t want that in your home (or maybe you do, but that’s on you).