Living room lighting guide: How to create the perfect living space
Introduction
The living room is, perhaps, the most significant investment we will make in our homes. Pulling double-duty as a social hub and a personal oasis, the humble living room should be inviting enough for friends and family yet comfortable enough for our own day-to-day lives. Crafting and decorating such a crucial space requires a lot of thought and creativity.
At Gantri, we specialize in bringing original and thoughtful lighting solution designs directly to you, and have created this guide to help you light the perfect living room.
Types of Lighting
If there is a single tip to take away from this guide it’s that truly great home lighting only comes from layering lighting. You will have more versatility and control over the atmosphere of your space when you utilize layers such as combining natural light with some of Gantri’s best luxury lighting solutions. Below are some of the different layers and sources to look for when laying out light for your living space.
The different layers of lighting
There are three main layers of lighting: ambient, accent, and task. Each serves a unique purpose and can be combined in the same space to enhance the entire lightscape.
Ambient lighting serves as the widest-throw of lighting and is utilized to set up a base level of lighting in the overall space. Accent lighting tends to have a smaller focus and helps accentuate unique features or fixtures. Finally, task lighting is lighting designed to help you perform a task, such as a work or reading lamp!
There’s a lot of nuance to the uses and best practices for each layer of lighting. If you’d like to read more about this, check out some of our other guides on Gantri's website!
Utilize natural lighting
Natural lighting is one of the best, and most cost-effective, ways to light up a room. Therefore, using the sun to its maximum potential is important. You want to be able to regulate the amount of sunlight, so it’s a great idea to incorporate curtains or drapes made out of soft, diffusing materials, such as sheer cotton, to bring a lively appearance to your room without harsh sunspots.
Warm light bulbs
A warm color temperature gives light bulbs a cozy and fiery glow. If you’re looking for the best lighting temperature for consumer bulbs, you should be looking in the range of 2700K-3000K for their warmth and brightness. Each designer light available from Gantri comes with a fully dimmable 2700K temperature LED bulb.
Tips for creating a living room lighting plan
Interior designers always work with a plan, so take careful consideration of some of the factors below when choosing lighting fixtures for important spaces like your living room.
What does your family do in the living room?
Consider what kind of functions and activities you want your living room to serve. Do you have friends and family over often? Are you a fan of game nights, movie marathons, or entertaining the kids? The answers will likely inform the lighting products you install. You want a well-lit room for entertaining or something with a dimmer setup and more aesthetic lighting for quiet nights in.
Either way you use it, you need the lighting to make it happen. Look at overhead or pendant lights for entertaining, or stylish floor lamps and wall sconces for your family to cozy up to watch TV.
Furniture placement
How your furniture is arranged throughout your living room will inform a lot of your lighting decisions. Is there a free space in a corner or beside the couch for a standing lamp? Do you have enough table space for a desk lamp? Maybe you’ve centered your living room furniture in a way where the best possible lighting solution would be overhead. These are all things to consider when deciding where to place your lights.
What do you want to show off?
Sometimes we have something special in our living rooms that we’d like to highlight. Whether it be a favorite piece of artwork, a bookcase, a TV cabinet, or a unique furniture piece, lighting will help you show it off. This is where accent lights become especially valuable. A wide-throw light can brighten the entire room, but it isn’t the best at accentuating anything in particular.
Something that may help you during the brainstorming process is drawing a simple map of your living room. Include all of the furniture and unique areas you want to focus on. This will help you decide where light fixtures can go and what can be moved around to perfect your space!
Best fixtures for your living room
With your plan in place, it’s time for the fun part. Shopping! Here are just a few of the key lighting fixture types and some inspirational pieces Gantri is proud to offer.
Overhead lighting
Few lighting solutions can affect the comfort and ambiance of a space like an overhead light. It’s important to consider the style of an overhead light since it will likely be the first thing someone notices when they enter your living room. You don’t want anything too out of place in size or design that it sticks out. You also don’t want something so small that it disappears into the room.
With wide throws and thoughtful design, pendant lights from Gantri will get you a staple piece that brings the entire room together. Pieces such as the Pendulum Pendant Light by Louis Filos. This original design evokes tried-and-true minimalistic design to create an elegant centerpiece that’s functional and stylish.
Table lamps and floor lamps
Floor and table lights are ubiquitous solutions to a lot of lighting challenges. Need light in a pinch for your favorite reading nook or game area? A floor light will always be right there by your side (literally!). A table light can similarly provide comfortable, focused lighting for nighttime relaxing with the people closest to you. They can be fit on bookshelves, side tables, or even windowsills if you’re creative!
If you’re looking for a fantastic addition to your living room collection, check out this Cantilever Floor Light, also by Louis Filosa! Not only does it make a fantastic companion piece to the Pendulum pendant light, but this perfectly off-center piece shines with undeniable charm.
Also consider pairing it with the Noah Table Light by Filippo Mambretti. The effortless form is rounded to provide a thoughtful, unobtrusive design to catch every passing eye.
Wall lights and specialized lights
A wall light excels at filling in the dark corners of a room and creates an artistic glow on otherwise plain walls. You can also utilize more out-of-the-box ideas like clip lights for endless versatility, or tap or strip lights to highlight bookshelves or display cases. They are especially easy to install and can help fill in hard-to-reach areas.
The Pavone Wall Light designed by Viviana Degrandi offers a unique shape that casts a comforting glow of light across your space in beautiful dimensions. Created to be an invitation of relaxation, this piece can help accentuate just how comfortable your living room can be. The best part? With a simple one-screw mounting kit, all you need to adorn your wall with gorgeous lighting is a screwdriver and an outlet!
If you need extra lighting in a pinch, you can also check out some of Gantri’s clamp lights. Designed to be installed almost anywhere to set up museum-quality lighting in moments!
Extra considerations
No plan comes without caveats. Some considerations and adjustments must always be made to personalize a lighting scheme for your own unique space. Here are some extra considerations to keep in mind.
Adjust for different size rooms
A larger room will either require more lighting solutions or brighter lights with a wider throw. A studio apartment and a family living room can be just as beautiful, but taking lights from one and putting them in another won’t make the space any better. Therefore, it’s important to consider the size of the room and ceiling height so you don’t end up with a layout too dark or far too bright.
Living room color scheme
Darker materials and colors, such as the upholstery of your couch or the paint of your walls, absorb more light and heat than lighter colors. A lighter color reflects light rather than absorbing it which brightens the space around it and dissipates heat. This is important to keep in mind as you’re laying things out. If you have a dark room, you’ll need more light options, and vis-versa if your room has more bright colors.
Mix lighting temperatures for extra layering
A variable range of color temperatures offers many unique opportunities for contrasting ambiance. The best advice we can offer is to experiment with what works best. Higher temperature bulbs in accent lights and lower in overheads? Or the opposite? Start with a “neutral” color temperature in overheard lights to give your living space a sense of balance when experimenting with different bulb temperatures.
Switches or dimmers?
The decision between switches or dimmers is important for the feel of your space. Some smaller living rooms may be okay with simple, economical switches, but there’s no denying the elegance of a dimmer switch to truly impress your guests! As a bonus, all of our Gantri lights include dimmable bulbs, allowing you to choose the perfect amount of light for every occasion.
It’s where you live, so make it livable
With your plan in hand and every option considered, we wish you luck in creating the living room of your dreams! We hope these tips helped. Gantri is proud to be offering sustainable and affordable lighting solutions to every consumer no matter their space’s needs. Click the links if you’d like to be further inspired or browse our shop today!