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Every room in a home has a mixture of lighting needs - whether it’s ambient or background lighting, task lighting for working or reading, or accent lighting to highlight special features such as artwork and sculptures positioned on the walls or floor. The atmosphere of a room can be improved with carefully chosen lighting. On the other hand, badly chosen lighting can make your living space feel dingy and out-of-date… so, if you’re acting as your own light designer, it’s important to make the right choices.
Accessorise your home with new light shades
Lampshades are the accessories of a home. Just as the right footwear or handbag can make its wearer look a million dollars, well-selected lighting accessories can adorn a room and give it a smart finish. And the opposite is true: the wrong choice of lighting accessory can look tasteless and let down other interior design elements. Perhaps it’s time to decommission that battered Chinese paper lamp from your student days and the ‘upside-down-cocktail-stick’ shade you inherited from the previous occupant and buy some modern pendant lighting, such as the Smarty Lamp, instead.
Think ahead… and outside the box
Try to think ahead when refurbishing a room and plan where shades will be hung before the electrician arrives. Try to think outside the box (room). A pendant light could hang anywhere – it doesn’t have to be in the centre of the room. You could, for example, hang a row of ceiling shades in a bay window, above the headboard or desk area or in clusters, in each alcove, each corner, or whatever makes the most of the space. If you’re lighting a kitchen, you could hang light shades in a row over a breakfast bar or kitchen worktop. Don’t forget lamps and where they’ll be positioned. Cylinder lamps can look great on a table.
Create unity
If you have the same light shades in different rooms, it creates a feeling of unity throughout the house. For example, you could hang a large shade, such as Elektra, hanging from the ceilings and place smaller versions of Elektra on side tables, on the floor and at each end of the sofa. Cosmo lamps are a popular choice with SmartyLamps.co.uk customers. Again, you could have Cosmo light shades hanging from the ceilings and Cosmo lamps positioned in strategic places around the house.
Size does matter
When selecting lighting for any room, consider the width and height of the space and choose an appropriate size of lampshade. Small lampshades hanging from the ceiling in a large room can look ‘lost’, while a small room such as a bathroom demands smaller shades. Topingo is fast becoming the second bestseller at SmartyLamps.co.uk because it functions well with typical ceiling heights in modern-build houses. If you’re trying to brighten up a hallway, Smarty Lamps such as Thor, Cedric and Swaine are all long and narrow and are ideal for this sort of space. Cosmo, the
bestselling Smarty Lamp, looks good almost anywhere and its globe shape is a popular upgrade from tired, old paper
globes. Topingo is disc-shaped and looks pleasingly circular from underneath. Meanwhile, Elektra suits rooms with high ceilings.
Even if you have a big room, you don’t need a big budget. It’s worth paying a little more to obtain lighting that fits the space properly. SmartyLamps.co.uk has cheap lamp shades that are made from fewer pieces than other designs. These cost under £20, even when ordered in the extra-large size.
As well as considering the size of your lampshade, think about the length of the flex. A longer flex can lower a shade to hang above a dining table. However, you may prefer a short flex in a hallway or any other area where you’ll be walking underneath. Cosmo and Topingo are ideal for hanging above dining tables as they are short in height but have plenty of width.
Don’t clash with the decades – unless it’s deliberate
Pay heed to the question, ‘does this fit in here’? Or, put more simply, does your lighting choice clash or blend with the rest of your décor? If you have a 30s Art Deco themed room, for example, it’s probably best to avoid installing Edwardian chandeliers – unless you’re deliberately trying to mix decades or be ironic. Smarty Lamps have the advantage of looking great in any space from a Victorian drawing room to a minimalistic lounge or a funky bedroom.
Mortal combat: the lighting and the television
Try to position lamps where they don’t glare into the TV screen. There’s no point in buying a decent television and a modern pendant lighting system, and then allowing the two to conflict with each other. After all, that HD broadcast won’t look quite so impressive if a light is placed directly in the path of the television.
Dim but not daft
Dimmer switches can add versatility to your existing light fixtures by allowing the brightness level to be turned down. They are an affordable quick fix to changing the ambience of the room. Dimmers can also help to conserve energy and extend bulb life. Smarty Lamps are designed to work with energy saving bulbs, which helps keep energy bills and your carbon footprint down. By choosing a different type of bulb, you can change the type of glow that’s emitted. Varieties of bulb available on the market include warmer, softer, daylight and low watt for decorative rather than functional purposes.
Colour the mood… from boudoir red to bright white
The atmosphere of a room can be heavily influenced by the choice of lampshade colour. Red shades will warm up the room but could create a rather dim ambience if used as the prevailing theme. Red could be a good choice in the bedroom for that boudoir look! Pink or cream shades will cast a warm light without turning the room into something out of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’. And do you really want to buy that blue or green shade that will cast an unearthly glow and make skin tones look a tad unusual? As for brown, there’s a place for it in interior design but use it sparingly. The Smarty Lamp, a white lampshade, can be used with coloured light bulbs or gels to create the desired ambience but it won’t clash with or overpower any room. If you don’t like the colour glow you’ve chosen, you can simply change the bulb.
Funky lampshades as child’s play
If you’re playing light designer for a children’s bedroom, think “fun and creativity”. Smarty Lamps look great in kids’ bedrooms and they encourage little minds to be active. Kids can view all the shapes made to create the lamp – touching upon maths, geometry, the platonic solid, rhombus, etc. – while babies love staring at Smarty Lamps: the geometric pattern is mesmerising. The lamps have been used in schools as they’re a great science and technology activity.
Brighten up your home and beat the downturn blues
The Smarty Lamp is the perfect recession-beating product. If you’ve had enough of a particular lampshade, you can simply take it down, disassemble it and make more lamp shades, as and when you please. The possibilities are endless! Hours of fun can be had reassembling the pieces into different and fascinating new shapes to hang in your home. That’s not just a lampshade: it is art!
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