How to create a lighting scheme

When we got married, I took a box of light bulbs

to the hotel and made them change all the light bulbs.

[camera person laughing]

Hi, I'm Brandon Schubert.

I'm an interior designer, and today I'm gonna show you

how to design and execute a lighting scheme for your home.

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I love designing lighting for interiors.

First of all, the room has to work, so you need function,

but more importantly, lighting gives the room its energy

and its atmosphere once the sun has gone down.

We're here today at a project in South London

that I designed to look at the lighting schemes,

how we've designed them,

and how they work in each given space.

Let's look at lighting a sitting room.

I always start a lighting design with a floor plan.

If you don't have a professional floor plan like we do,

you can always sketch something out on graph paper

or with a scale rule if you want.

Someone told me once

that the most important rule of lighting design

is to light objects and surfaces, not space.

There's something about seeing a room from above

that allows you of visualize

the objects you're trying to light

rather than the space as you're standing there.

The other thing to think about

is lighting different levels of a room.

So we have ceiling lights, which are above your head.

We might have wall lights at eye level,

and we might have table lamps at below eye level,

but it's important to get lighting at all of those levels

so that a room feels natural

and immersive when you're standing in it at night.

These two lights by the bookcase,

they're washing the front of the bookcase down

so that you get a glow on the books themselves

rather than just pointing at the ground.

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The two decorative wall lights either side

are giving you a really subtle glow,

and in fact, I put a very low wattage bulb in those,

and I also have put a gold line shade on them

so that they just give you a warm hint of light,

but they're not doing anything really.

They're just giving you ambient light.

I've got a track running on the horizontal side of this wall

all the way down one side

so that those lights can point at the wall opposite,

so they're providing that surface with a glow at night.

I love table lamps,

you know, I could buy table lamps all day.

I spend my days on eBay,

buying up vases and turning them into lamps.

It's one of the joys of my design career.

Think about them as a great accessory

for making your lighting scheme feel varied

and feel decorative

because they have great decorative value

in addition to being a source of light.

The floor lamp by the chair is giving you the ability

to sit there and read a book in the evening,

and it's also giving you height

in what would otherwise be a fairly empty corner.

I've also put a large floor lamp

by this easy chair in the corner

because again, you want that height to fill the space.

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Now we're gonna look at lighting a kitchen and dining space.

It's very often the case

that your kitchen and a dining space are connected,

so we think about lighting those two elements together.

When you're lighting a kitchen,

the first thing to think about is task lighting.

Kitchens are all about function.

In a kitchen, I use downlights to light a surface

that we're gonna be using to work.

So if you think about a kitchen island, for example,

it is important that that island be lit uniformly

and it be lit from more than one direction

so you don't end up with uncomfortable shadows

that get in your way when you're trying to work.

Because this is quite a narrow room,

we can't really have table lamps

and other decorative fittings on that side.

So again, I've settled for recess downlights

shining on those walls just to give them a glow.

And here as well.

When you're buying a downlight, you oftentimes have a choice

of getting a fixed downlight or getting one that will tilt,

and it's much better to wash a wall with light

than it is just to pour light down onto the floor.

But what do you do

when you wanna set the mood for a dinner party

or an evening where you're having friends over

and people are going to be in the connected room

looking at the kitchen?

I've used under counter lighting under the cupboards above.

If possible, I use LED strips and I like to position them

at the front edge of the cupboards above

so that they don't cast a funny shadow

when they shine down on the splashback behind the worktop.

And running along the top lighting up onto the ceiling,

they can both be turned down on a dimmer switch

to just provide a soft glow that just accentuates the room

without lighting it up brightly.

So in the dining room, again, we're gonna start

with the furniture plan as the driver of where things go.

Clearly, the dining table's in the center of the room

and we want a pendant over the dining table.

What I like about this light is not only does it have

a lot of character as an antique light fitting,

but these Vaseline glass shades hide the bulbs a bit

and soften the light, giving it a little bit more moodiness,

a little bit more diffuse character.

Dimmers are especially important in a dining room.

You always want to be able

to turn that central light over the dining table down

to a very low level when you're having a meal.

We then have space for furniture

all the way around the outside.

So we have two pieces of furniture,

either side of the chimney breast,

and a sideboard running along this wall.

So I've taken the opportunity to put table lamps

on each of those pieces of furniture.

The other thing I think about all the time with table lamps

is the size and shape that they are.

I try not to put

a very heavy table lamp on a very small table

because I think it's outta proportion.

If you can get the balance into the right place

where the table lamp sits comfortably

on the thing that it's on, it will feel more natural.

That's all the light fittings we have in this room.

Table lamps and the central light over the dining room.

That said, there's plenty of opportunity

to bring in candles and other kinds of lights

when the mood requires.

Let's talk about how to light a bedroom.

I think anytime you enter a room, you want a light switch

that operates at least one light in a room,

and bedrooms are no different.

So in this bedroom, I've started with a ceiling light,

which I positioned in the center of the room.

By the way, an interesting way to find

the center of a room if you're in doubt, is to draw a line

from one corner to the other corner in a diagonal

and then draw another diagonal line from that corner

to the other corner, which ignores a chimney breast.

And one of the things people often mistake

is they take the center line from the chimney breast

to the other wall rather than doing it with an X.

So I started with a central ceiling light in this room,

I've also added a five amp circuit

to control the lamps in this room.

This is a way that you can control table lamps by a switch.

I'm making a small symbol, which is for a five amp socket,

showing how those lamps would be switched.

And we put two bedside lamps either side of the bed,

and these are not operated on the five amp circuit.

They're switched on the lamps themselves.

The choice of light bulbs is super important

to the way a table lamp or any light fitting works.

I personally like most table lamps

to be on a lower wattage bulb

so that they're just providing a warm yellow glow.

I also really pay attention to color temperature.

I really try to avoid anything

above 2,700 degrees Kelvin, I stay away from 3,000,

and I definitely stay away from 4,000

because they put out a cold blue light

that just isn't inviting.

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In this small bedroom, which is a cozy, intimate space

I wanted to make sure we got a variety

of different types of lights.

In this room in terms of circuits,

I've broken the ceiling light and the wall lights up.

You can turn those wall lights on,

so that they greet people as they come up the stairs,

and it isn't just a dark room,

but it equally isn't a fully lit room.

I've also put a single bedside lamp between the single beds,

which is not switched at the door,

but is instead switched on the lamp itself.

With a bedside lamp, the height is super important.

You don't want to be distracted by the glare of a light bulb

as you're trying to read your book at night.

So you size the table lamp

according to the height of the bed,

the height of the bedside table,

and the position of the person who's gonna be reading.

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