Lighting for Your Great Room

Living spaces provide prime opportunities for multi-layer lighting schemes to enhance room ambiance, dramatize wall textures, accent artwork or just provide general illumination in the den, living room, family room, playroom, or bedrooms.

Recessed lighting is one of the preferred ways to light a general area because the light source is concealed. But close to ceiling or decorative fluorescent fixtures can also provide great general lighting.

For accenting artwork, wall washing or grazing, recessed or track fixtures can bring life to a room. Further, low voltage strip lighting helps create drama in bookcases.

Finally, for visual tasks such as reading, playing games, or hobbies, you will require more light than the general illumination provided in the room. To accommodate this need recessed, track lighting, pendants, or portable lamps can provide ample task lighting.

No matter what your lighting needs are for your Great Room, a Lighting One showroom should be able to assist you. Visit www.lighting-one.com for your nearest showroom.

Extend the Enjoyment of your Landscape Lighting

Your home is the single biggest investment you'll ever make. Your home is your castle and your yard is your domain. But for a good part of the year by the time you get home from work your yard is dark. You can't see the landscaping at all, and the house just fades into the night. More and more people are finding that architectural and landscape lighting allows them to extend the enjoyment of their landscape investment into the evening hours. The right lighting creates a warm and welcoming atmosphere for the exterior of your home and your yard. You'll even enjoy the lighting from inside.

You can enhance the ambiance of your property at night with low-voltage landscape lighting of trees, shrubs and flowers. You can also increase safety by lighting up stairs, driveways and walkways.

Just like the new low-voltage recessed lighting that many homeowners are using inside their homes to save money as energy costs rise, low voltage landscape lighting is available for outdoors, that uses only 12 volts of electricity. This type of lighting is energy efficient, safe to install, and offers better control of light than 120 Volt builders style lighting.

A certified Lighting One designer can easily create a lighting plan by choosing one or two points of interest and making these the centerpiece of your landscape lighting display, and then building the rest of your lighting plan around your focal points. Unique landscape features, such as sculptures and shaped shrubbery, can be highlighted using spotlights, or a sequence of spotlights can create an interesting mosaic of colors and textures. In addition, up lighting adds visual interest to objects such as trees, bushes, statues and fountains.

Other techniques include the use of path lighting to illuminate the areas where people walk or drive, which adds safety as well as beauty. Floodlighting is also a versatile technique used for illuminating a wide range of features including walls, garden ponds or gazebos.

Use silhouetting to provide dramatic effects on a broad surface, like a wall, behind a landscape feature such as bushes. Wall lighting can be incorporated into a wall that a building, pool or walkway area for added visibility.

Many homeowners let their landscaper or electrician design their landscape lighting, but these people aren't the experts in this field. For the best results and maximum energy savings, a certified lighting designer, trained by Lighting One University or the American Lighting Association, should design your landscape lighting. Whether designing landscape lighting or interior lighting, lighting designers are more familiar with the current trends in lighting and use the most energy-efficient lighting products.

Although a homeowner can easily install a small job, on a major exterior renovation a licensed electrician should be used. A well-planned landscape lighting job will encourage more use of your outdoor property and enhance the value of your home.


Written by Philip Finkelstein, a Lighting One certified lighting designer, and owner of Illuminations in Rockville Centre, NY for the past 30 years. To locate the Lighting One showroom nearest you, visit http://www.lighting-one.com/.

Sconces: A Home’s Secret Weapon

Perhaps more than any other type of interior lighting, the wall sconce is the most underrated and underutilized. Almost magical in the way it can transform boring areas into interesting and inviting spaces, the wall sconce should be prevalent in every house that wants to feel like a home.

Whenever possible, use wall sconces in hallways to get a warm, comfortable feeling that will draw you further into the hall and help lead you to whatever room or rooms lie ahead. You can’t get that result using standard recessed cans or simple flush mount fixtures to light the area. Wall sconces can create a nice glow that gives a sense of softness to halls and makes them an added feature in a home rather than an area to avoid. Typically, wall sconces should be mounted at 68” to 72” from the floor.

Large sun-filled great rooms are wonderful during the day, but tend to feel like big, scary, dark caverns at night. Sconces mounted around the perimeter of the room will make the room seem smaller and more intimate.

In lower levels, sconces will dress up the area so that it doesn’t feel like a “basement” and the low-level light from dimmed sconces will give the impression of warmth in an area that often feels cool.

Stairways are another great place for sconces. Many styles can act as a focal point in this area, hanging on the wall like a functional piece of art. A wall sconce also allows for easier maintenance. Reaching and changing the light bulb in a sconce is much easier than in a ceiling fixture or a recessed light that would usually require a ladder in a stairway.

Finally, rather than just another coach light on the outside of your home, outdoor-rated sconces can really make that back deck feel like an extension of your indoor living space.

By making large rooms feel cozier and making small spaces seem special; the power of wall sconces to transform any area to something more desirable should not be underestimated.

Article written by Mark Hansen, Lighting Design Expert at The Ar-Jay Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. To locate the closest Lighting One showroom, visit www.lighting-one.com. Sconce shown in photo is 8820-CC from the Knight's Bridge Collection, available at Lighting One showrooms.