We’re about 10 years into having lighting integrated within the AV industry, and I have spoken to — and worked with — many integrators in that time. The feedback that I often get from them is that lighting takes a tremendous amount of time to get it right, which is certainly true. To help custom installers get it right quicker, I am going to outline the three phases of a lighting project and present some of the more common pitfalls and roadblocks you will face in them, along with how to overcome these challenges.
Phase 1: Initial Layout
This first phase is the one that everybody pays attention to and tackles questions like, “How are we going to do this design?” “Where do the fixtures go?” and “What’s the zoning?” The answers are presented in plans that either the electrician or somebody on your team could go ahead and price it out and install it.
The challenge here is what happens when the other stakeholders question what you have done. No matter who is questioning it — the architect, the interior designer, or even the homeowner — you have got to be able to defend your design. The consequence of not doing that will result in a poor experience for the client, and you will likely bear the blame for it.
However, this challenge is also an opportunity to teach them something. Here is an example:
Let’s say you have a client with a long wall —18 feet long and 9 feet tall. The client says to you that they are going to have a bunch of artwork on the wall, and they don’t know what it’s going to be. The way that you have to look at that request is to provide as much flexibility as possible.
Find this story and many other helpful tips in the ‘Residential Lighting Best Practices Guide 2025.’
A very common spacing criterion is that you can never exceed more than 1.25 times the distance off the wall for your light placement. For the 9-foot ceiling, if you were 27 inches off the wall, the most you can go is about 32 inches apart. That’s within 1.25 times the distance from the wall. That metric is so tried-and-true that it’s very hard for somebody to say that’s wrong because it is proven to work. It’s in the photometry and it allows you to then place wall washers, downlights, or adjustable accents to be able to do anything you need along that wall. So, based on that criteria, you’ve got seven fixtures along that 18-foot wall.
Then somebody — maybe the interior designer — says to you, “That looks like a lot of lights.” And you want to say, “A lot? Based on what? Based on the fact that you don’t understand photometry?” But you know you can’t say that.
How do you explain what it is that you’re trying to do gets into the logic of making sure that you designed the lighting and laid it out based on understanding the photometry of the fixtures, understanding what you’re being asked to do, and then presenting it in a way that is not arrogant, but is confident?
In this case, the answer would be if you want ultimate flexibility and the capability to light anything on that wall, then you have to understand that your fixtures have to be placed so that you don’t get gaps in the light. If you were going to reduce it by one fixture, then you would have to come in 2 feet from each end of the 18-foot wall. So, that’s 16 times 12, divided by 32. You’d have six fixtures. If they want to do five fixtures because six still looks like too much, then the answer is not to increase your spacing but to decrease the overall distance that you’re lighting.
You would then have to explain that the flip side to doing it the recommended way is that you are sacrificing the corners, and the people questioning you will need them to commit to the fact that it’s okay to do it like that.
Ultimately, you should plan multiple solutions to a room so that if one gets shut down, you can’t claim that’s the only way to do it. You must have a backup plan. There are different ways of making them understand that there’s a different way of thinking about things, and when you say there are two or three different ways to do this, it shows that you’re willing to work with them because you’re a member of the team and part of the process.
Phase 2: “To Be Determined”
The second part that everybody, myself included, struggles with is that there are typically tons and tons of “TBD” things to be named later. It could be all the millwork lighting, under-cabinet lighting, toe-kick lighting — anything that’s built into something else.
When you’re doing the initial design, most people are concentrated on the recessed fixtures, and you might have circuits in there for the obvious things like under-cabinet lighting, but there are so many different things that make a design special.
Unfortunately, when the first part of the design is started, we will rarely get a set of architectural plans where all those things are figured out. So, a lot of times you might have to provide a circuit for future millwork lighting or for future accent lighting inside the closets, master dressing rooms, and so on that are notorious for being “to be named later.”
The challenge for all of us is figuring out when you follow up on that because we’re all working on a million different projects. It gets even more complex if you’re an AV integrator and you’re also selling the product. You have priced out two-thirds of it, including the downlights and some of the other easy stuff, but you have all these other millwork needs — and it could be tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear. Think about the homeowner’s perspective — how do you alert whoever’s buying the lights from you that the initial price does not include all those specialty fixtures? You have 400 linear feet of lighting that’s not accounted for at $100 per foot. That’s $40,000 of additional lighting spend!
You have to prepare them. Tell them, “I just want to let you know when we’re putting together this quote that we’re quoting out everything that is very clearly defined and we’re putting in allowances for everything else, and those allowances are based on the assumptions of the plans that we have right now, but we’re going to have to revisit them.” You should also put that in writing.
You will also have to repeatedly ask for the millwork drawings because if you don’t, then the millwork gets built with some sort of assumption, and inevitably it’s going to be wrong. Then it gets delivered to the job site near the end of the project, and everybody’s screaming to get into the house, and it becomes a question of what can we get right now — and right now is never going to be good because any decent fixture is not sitting on a shelf.
By not figuring out this second phase of design, you’re setting yourself up for failure because, when all the cards are on the table and people are looking to point fingers at whose fault it is, they will be aimed at you. That is why many times we will put in as much lighting as humanly possible when we get the plans. If we see shelf lighting and we have elevations, even though they’re not final work drawings, we’re going to put in what we think should go in there.
We will have notes all over our plans and all over our fixture schedules, saying to confirm fixture type and quantity with final millwork drawings before ordering. As long as you remember to follow up on it — which is the hard part for all of us — then it should happen as expected.
Phase 3: Fixing Problems
The times in my career when I have been brought onto a job to fix somebody else’s mistake have helped me to learn more than anything else I have done. On those jobs, you have to get down to what the problem is and what can be done to fix it. After all, the answer can’t always be to rip out the ceiling and start from scratch — you have to figure out what you can do with what’s there.
To know what to improve upon, you have to address with the client what the actual problem is, and so you have to get good at asking directed questions to get specific answers.
For example, and this is a common one, let’s say you are brought into a kitchen project and the client says, “I’ve got all these recessed fixtures in here, but I can’t see anything! My kitchen feels bright, but I can’t see what’s on my countertop.” That should immediately inform you that the light that’s up in the ceiling is not getting down to the work surface. That is a common problem when wafer lights are used because they glow at the ceiling, but they don’t have any optical control to push the light down.
A good rule of thumb to help identify the problem is to examine the fixture and see if that inherently is the cause of the problem. If the challenge is to get more light down onto the countertop, then the answer is to choose a fixture that has more optical control to push light out of the fixture.
Another common problem is that the homeowner finds their living room is too dark and you walk into the space, and notice that all the light is in the middle of the room and not hitting the walls. In this case, the answer is to light the walls. Sometimes that’s a harder solution because if they don’t want to change their ceiling, then you have to get creative. If those fixtures are too far away from the walls, then you can’t just put in an adjustable trim and angle it to the wall — that’s not going to work.
If there are existing downlights, then you don’t want a situation where you have six or eight of them in the middle of the room and then you have to add 10 on the perimeter, because now that’s a mes,s and the reality is that they’re probably going to have to rip down the ceiling and start from scratch.
That is a situation where you have to solve both problems — getting light both on the walls and in the middle of the room. You might have to add something that is not recessed to light the walls so that you don’t have a mess. It could be a track or a linear wall washer, depending on the surface.
More Advice from Peter Romaniello, IALD: The Art of Lighting Design
It’s always about solving the problem. The answer isn’t always to add more recessed lights — it could be as simple as adding table and floor lamps. It could be adding wall sconces. You have to put on the hat of both a lighting designer and an interior designer, especially if this is a finished project.
If there’s somebody else involved, like an interior designer, then I’ll always say, “Let’s find out what that person is thinking because we need to come together to create a solution. I can look at it from one way, they’re going to look at it from another way.” You have to make sure everyone is on the same page because you want to fix it once and not twice.
For a lighting designer, there is no utopian situation where it’s just about the lighting. It’s always about making sure that the design aesthetically fits in the space and how you make it all work. In this, it is not dissimilar from AV work — you get called into a high-rise condo where you’re dealing with one junction box in the middle of a living space that is on a concrete slab. What do you do? You’ve got to get creative about where you can get wiring — maybe even dropping the ceiling if you’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.
You’ve got to look at lighting the same way and get creative knowing that it’s probably not the greatest overall solution, but you’re trying to make it better than it is.
Those are just a few of the challenges you will face in lighting, and the more you do it, the better you will get at analyzing and solving the issues that come up. Stick with it, and if you get into trouble, you can always reach out to your local lighting designer.
