Focus lighting helps to add texture, color and depth to any room's decor.
Lighting doesn't just serve a utilitarian purpose in a room. Perhaps even more importantly, it adds warmth, color, and helps to move the eye throughout the room's interior.
And when it comes to creating a dramatic effect in a room, or pulling your eye to a desired area, there's nothing like focus lighting to accomplish that effect. And best of all, it's something you can do yourself, with relative ease and little expense. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Choose the accent area (or areas) in the room in which you want to add focus lighting. Make a note of adjacent colors, textures, and special requirements for each area requiring lighting in order to choose the appropriately sized and designed lighting element.
2. Pick a specific accent item in each area, whether it's a print or painting on the wall, a piece of bric a brac or sculpture, or an inviting nook or combination of furnishings. This is important because these pieces not only provide lighting inspiration, they will also provide focus for your newly added lighting around the room.
3. Choose a lamp or lighting element that fits in with the room's predominant colors and textures. For instance, wrought iron lamps or fixtures for traditional rooms, or more minimalistic brushed steel for more modern rooms and effects.
4. Choose a wall-mounted piece or floor lamp to accent wall prints or accents. For best results in larger rooms, choose a similar pair of floor lamps in matching colors and styles to accent opposing or distant areas of the room.
5. Add focus lighting in smaller areas by interspersing smaller lamps in the same style and period throughout the room's shelving itself, placing them in especially lovely places to spotlight anything from smaller "objets d'art," collectible books, or smaller pieces of sculpture. This lighting is inexpensively obtainable at any major superstore or household goods store, yet it's the perfect small finishing touch for adding focus and warmth throughout the room just where you need it.
6. Place your lamps around the room in ways that do not cause glare or direct refraction with the eye of the person entering.
7. Upon completion, look around the room and ensure that all lighting pieces offer lighting that fills the room while also adding focus throughout at least most of the room itself to its more notable aspects or pieces. Make subtle adjustments as needed so that the eye skips from light source to focus light source.
Tags: around room, throughout room, adding focus, areas room, colors textures
