Of your last one hundred clients, how many of them spared no expense on lighting?
We love pulling out all the stops and delivering over-the-top, beautiful, dynamic lighting designs for our customers, but this happens about as often as the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. Far more often, clients who are open to improving their lighting tack on two words that work like scissors on the budget: “within reason.” Even those who say they want the best often back off from the claim when they see how much great lighting can cost. How can you deliver great results on a tight budget?
Over the years, our team has repeatedly utilized three little upgrades that can make the biggest impact, and we use these same techniques, albeit with different products, on everything from multi-family production builds to luxury custom homes. When you light what people see, provide a comfortable layer of indoor path lighting, and gently light the indoor sky, your projects will be the exact opposite of the disc-light-filled, glare-inducing lighting all too common today.
Upgrade 1: Adjustables
I often joke that there are only three or four recessed downlights in our typical project: one in each of the showers. While the truth is more nuanced, the underlying reality is captured in the joke: We limit recessed downlights to wet locations and use recessed adjustable downlights everywhere else. Adding adjustability to the fixture specification, or the ability to tilt the light engine so that you can aim the light more at the walls and vertical surfaces, allows us to illuminate what people see the most: the things in front of them.
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Most homes that utilize recessed lighting use fixed recessed lights that illuminate directly below themselves, which can sometimes be fine over kitchen islands and in showers, but leaves the home’s features in shadow. Our sweet spot of vision, technically the narrow field and focused vision, is usually out in front of us where we place windows, artwork, beautiful cabinetry, stone chimneys, and more. Recessed adjustable downlights — or aimable monopoint spotlights on sloped ceilings — allow us to push the light to those features. The result is reduced glare and a home that looks more beautiful while reducing glare.
Upgrade 2: Indoor Paths
Our second upgrade often results in raised eyebrows from our clients, their skepticism frequently voiced as “do we really need those?” Need? Strictly speaking, no. Want? Yes, absolutely, but the clients will not know this until they live with recessed step/path lights for a few months. A typical Light Can Help You design could feature 30 or 40 recessed step lights located in transitions between rooms, down hallways, near water closets, inside walk-in closets, at entries, and, yes, on stairways. This approach can be breathtakingly simple and easy to install: most step lights install like a common receptacle.
The result is a gently illuminated pathway throughout the entire home that reduces reliance on overhead lighting that might cause glare and discomfort, like a well-illuminated garden pathway. A typical homeowner who arrives home late at night after a party will turn on dozens of overhead lights on the journey through the home toward bed; with recessed step lights, they might not turn any on at all. And that client skepticism? We repeatedly hear that the recessed step/path lights are the client’s favorite light fixtures of the entire home.
Upgrade 3: Light Your Sky
Our final upgrade takes a little more work but is often worth the effort: adding a layer of indirect light to the ceiling. Twenty years ago, when my wife and I were expecting our second child, I built out a primary bedroom suite in our starter home and added two layers of indirect light bouncing off the ceiling: white for daytime use and blue for nighttime use. I loved it, and your clients likely will appreciate the ability to brighten a room with a solution that, when well-executed, can be 100% glare-free.
I designed and built ceiling coves along two walls of my own home with hiding space for full-size light bulbs, but most of the houseplans that come across our desks today have, at best, a tray ceiling or sloped “cathedral” ceiling with little thought to where to place indirect lighting. Do not let that stop you from suggesting it, because a simple 1×2 with a dado groove for LED strips can be attached to the walls with zero framing changes. We have done this so many times that it is our most common detail, but the results still wow clients.
Related: Light Can Help You Launches LDX: The Lighting Design Experience Training Program
Indirect lighting is also the one place I encourage even the most traditional homeowners to consider color-changing capabilities. Bouncing deep blue light off the ceiling at night can be supremely relaxing or, with the addition of a few candles, beautifully romantic.
When clients appear reluctant to spend money upgrading their lighting, lean on these three (relatively) easy upgrades to deliver show-stopping impact without blowing the budget. Your clients will enjoy their homes more, day and night, and they will remember you when they host their friends for dinner. Satisfied clients and new opportunities…who could ask for more?
