When designing your home, one area that often gets overlooked is your lighting.
A lighting plan is a design of the ideal lighting for your home. It demonstrates how to efficiently illuminate your home while considering the different rooms’ purpose, design, and colour.

Knowing the purpose of each room is essential when creating a suitable lighting design for your home. It allows you to understand what activities may take place in a room and provide practical and ambient lighting.

Did you know there are three types of lighting? Each type — task, ambient, and accent—meets a different need. Here’s a summary of each to understand their purposes.

Task Lighting: Consider the purposes of your space. How much lighting would you require to complete tasks? The optimal amount of light enables your area to be used for functional activities like cooking in your kitchen, paying the bills, or sitting at the dining table.

Ambient lighting, also known as general lighting, is typically created using overhead fittings like LED downlights, track lights, and other ceiling lights. It can also be created using floor and table lamps.
Consider using LEDs with a warmer colour temperature for a more welcoming look and feel.

As the word suggests, accent lighting is used to draw attention to a particular area of a room. Accent lighting is frequently used to highlight decorative items like artwork, indoor plants and other decorations.
Track lighting, or wall-mounted fixtures like picture lights (one of my favourites), which can be tilted and directed to generate a spotlight, are the most common ways to achieve this.

Accent lighting can also be used to highlight the textures of buildings, outdoor landscaping, and many other interesting features.

We hope that understanding and appreciating the three various forms of lighting and some application examples will help you create the ideal lighting in every room.

Were you surprised to hear there are three types of lighting?