Indy Total Construction

The home office may be in a room on its own, it may share the kitchen table or a corner of the living room, or it may simply be a wide shelf in a child’s room where homework is done.

Wherever it is, adequate lighting with no confusing shadows is necessary and similar lighting is required for close work such as model making, sewing or drawing. For all these activities, the lighting requirements remain the same: for close work, you need at least 200 watts of incandescent light (the most common form of lighting, using standard screw or bayonet light bulbs and rather yellow) or 400 watts of fluorescent light directed onto the work area, with a good general back-up light from elsewhere.

You always need sufficient background light to see the room and its contents, otherwise the contrast between the darkness of the room and the brightness of the work area will strain your eyes.

A desk is best placed against the wall rather than in front of the window because light from outside alters constantly, being dull sometimes and brightly sunny at others, so that the interior lighting would need to be constantly adjusted.

Fluorescent light is used a great deal in large offices because of its white, shadow less quality. In small rooms, however, low-voltage work lamps give a clear, white light which is ideal for working and even an incandescent angled lamp will give a perfectly adequate light.

Lighting should come from above and behind the worker, and should shine on the work without casting shadows or glaring into the eyes. A good form of lighting for a workspace which doubles as a dining table is a rise-and-fall lamp hanging from the ceiling. This can be pulled down low over the table for intimate conversations, raised slightly for reading and writing, and raised still higher to give a more general illumination.

Desk lamps should stand so that the lower edge of the shade is about level with your eyes when you are sitting working. Use a 75 watt or 100 watt incandescent bulb with a reflective (silvered) interior, which concentrates the light and gives the impression of a larger bulb.

The most popular lamps among architects, designers and other people who work at desks or drawing boards are angled desk lamps such as an Angle poise or a lamp called the ’2001′, which have springs to keep them in place once they have been positioned. The heads are flexible and they can be used as down lighters, shining down on the page, or as up lighters illuminating the whole of the work area with reflected light from the wall or ceiling. (This is particularly good for computer work.)

They are available in table-mounted, clamp or clip-on versions and some are available with floor stands, the head and arm sections simply slotting into whatever base you choose. Their flexibility makes them ideal for small workspaces.

General lighting for young children should be bright and revealing. Children like to make full use of the whole room and all the floor space when they are playing, and they will be encouraged to do so if the room is well lit.

Satisfactory lighting can be provided by a single ceiling pendant with a high-wattage bulb, up to 150 watts, and a pretty but not too obscuring shade. The ubiquitous Japanese globe-shaped paper lampshades are ideal for this, giving a clear but non-glaring light. Many have printed designs specially for children, although the natural white ones give a lovely light. If you do buy one with pictures or some sort of design, check that it lets plenty of clear light through.

All desks in the house should be provided with an adjustable lamp and children’s homework areas are no exception. Even before they go to school, children like to paint and draw, cut out, stick, make models and so on, and for all these activities they need good light. Bad light will deter them from doing homework, although neither child nor parent may realize what the problem is.

For older children, it is important that this general light should be boosted by various lights for the different activities they undertake. The smaller the home, the more likely a child will be to sleep, work, play and entertain friends in the one room.

These individual lights should be chosen with care. Take the bed, for example: even very young children like to look at picture books in bed, and older children usually enjoy reading before they go to sleep. A good reading light is essential and if the children are in bunks each bunk should have its own lamp. Young children should have a pull cord and a light fixed to the wall, not one standing on a table which could be knocked over. Alternatively, the light could be switched on and off from the door so that the parent is in control. An older child can have a light which is switched on and off from the bed so that he or she can read before settling down to sleep.

In children’s rooms it is most important to plan for safety. There should be absolutely no trailing leads, and nothing easily knocked over or broken. Lamps should be ceiling- or wall-hung, or firmly fixed to the frame of the bed or bunk. When installing sockets, set them at table height so that young crawlers and toddlers won’t be tempted to poke their fingers into them. Where floor-level sockets already exist, fit them with clip-on socket covers.

Unfortunately, children are prime targets for badly made goods; if something is pretty enough or advertised enough, a child will want it and it can be hard to say no. However, where lighting is concerned, poor-quality fittings must be absolutely taboo. Metal lamps may be badly insulated and become live; plastic lamps may break or simply fall to pieces. Always look for safety symbols when buying lamps, or buy from reputable manufacturers and retailers. Old fittings, no matter how charming and nostalgic, are a potential danger and there are plenty of new fittings which are safe, fun and inexpensive.

Another very important consideration for children’s rooms is a nightlight. Some children find it frightening to be left completely in the dark, but there is a good choice of lamps which just give a dim glow to help them to go to sleep and to comfort them if they wake up in the middle of the night. It doesn’t have to be a bright illumination, indeed too bright a light would be disturbing.

This is lighting for doing a specific job of work which requires you to be able to see clearly. It applies just as much to reading a book in a comfortable armchair as working at a desk or sewing table, or the kitchen worktop.

In the kitchen, it is important that clear, shadow less light should fall on the worktop where intricate operations with knives and measuring scales are going on all the time. Spot lamps and eyeball lights can be good here, and so can small strip lights fitted under the cupboards or shelves above the worktop. These give a good working light but are also soft and user-friendly because the light source is concealed and they are low.

Among the most useful task lights are angled lamps which can be directed at will. You can alter them to light up a book or sewing machine, or to move the light from one part of your desk to another.

Floor lamps, or standard lamps, which direct the light downwards, make good reading lights, particularly if placed behind an armchair where they give a pleasant ‘mood’ light in a corner at the same time.

Low-voltage lighting, which came onto the market comparatively, recently, can be effective for task lighting. The bulb itself is tiny and the reflectors round it give far more precise optical control than ordinary bulbs. Low-voltage lights operate on a supply of only 12 or 14 volts, much less than the mains voltage supply, and they are a fraction of the size of conventional bulbs.

If you want a low-voltage system installed throughout your home, get it done before you do any decorating and remember you will need space for a transformer (probably about the size of a gas or electricity meter).

Make sure such a system is on dimmer switches because, small though the bulbs are they can be very bright; if they are over a dining table, say, you may not want them to be too brilliant.

Task lighting in the bathroom or bedroom, for makeup and hairdressing, can be produced either by strips of small incandescent bulbs, which are practical but cruel, or by small fluorescent strips behind a baffle. Bathroom lights should be specially designed to conform to safety regulations and should either be switched on from outside the bathroom door or operated by a pull cord.

It’s one thing to know that good lighting is important in a home but quite another to achieve it. Lighting can be a very technical subject beset with jargon of lumen and wattage, up lighters and down lighters, the confusion of the innumerable types of light bulbs available and the difficulty of finding light fittings which please and do the right job.

But good lighting without the jargon is perfectly possible if you identify what you need it to do and then go and find lamps which do it. There is a short glossary to help you understand the most commonly used lighting terms.

Basically you need three types of lighting in the home. The first is ‘general’ lighting, which enables you to see your way around safely and comfortably; the second is ‘task’ lighting, for reading and working by, and that includes cooking, sewing, homework, paperwork, woodwork, model making and so on; the third is ‘highlighting’, which is used to light up sculptures, paintings, flower arrangements or any other aspect of your home you wish to make a feature of.

There is a fourth category and that is ‘mood’ lighting, whose purpose is to create pools of soft light which help provide an atmosphere of comfort and encourage relaxation and a feeling of calm. Lighting has much more influence psychologically than many people realize, but if you choose the first three types of lighting carefully they should in themselves be able to provide mood lighting at the same time as doing their other specific jobs.

There are various different ways in which to achieve these kinds of lighting and a tour of the home will demonstrate them.