Luxury Interior Design Lighting

At this gloomy time of year – with evenings long and days grey – lighting can transform your home from downcast and tired, to cosy and inspiring. In this journal, we’d like to explain why considered interior lighting is so crucial to a luxury interior, along with some expert advice from home technology experts, Homeplay, on integrating a high-quality lighting system into your home. We will also be sharing some beautiful decorative lighting we have introduced into our clients’ homes over the years, leaving you with a superb selection of interior lighting inspiration!

Helen also shared the importance of conceptualising exterior spaces as an extension of the interior when it comes to outdoor lighting, a topic we’ll be exploring in a future blog…

Lighting is a crucial element of Holistic Interior Design, with its focus on promoting personal wellness through incorporating elements that nurture our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. 

Indeed, lighting fundamentally affects our biology, playing a central role in the functioning of our circadian rhythm – the natural process of regulating the sleep-wake cycle – telling our brains when to wake up and when to go to sleep. Lighting also affects our psychology, with suboptimal lighting encouraging a low mood and procrastination, and optimal lighting encouraging a feeling of happiness and productivity. Curated lighting should fill each room with the correct ambience to enhance functionality and nurture the intended mood.

Good lighting is also an art. Decorative lighting can transform the visual look of your interior, acting as a piece of fine art or a sculptural masterpiece that energise your creative spirits. When one also carefully considers their placement, one’s lighting can further invite depth, curvaceous silhouettes, dancing shadows, enriching colours and layered texture. The final product? A palpable yet intangible ambience. Functionality without beauty is simply not enough in luxury interior design.

Finally, lighting can dramatically uplift your interior when designed in harmony with it and through the utilisation of appropriate fixtures. This may include task lighting – direct, intense lighting for carrying out detailed work; ambient lighting – a soft, generally uniform, glow throughout a space; and accent lighting – highlighting a specific focal point. Such lighting can be used to seamlessly zone areas, unifying or distinguishing specific areas depending on their intended usage. Consider an open plan kitchen-dining-living room – task lighting can provide direct illumination for detailed food prep, ambient lighting can create a soothing mood to encourage moments of relaxation, whilst accent lighting can accentuate a grand dining table or up lit bespoke artwork.

Lighting Systems

As a general principle, it’s worth investing in high-quality lighting. Well-designed lighting can give you years of functionality and ambience and can be upgraded with new fittings to fit your changing interior taste or seasonal mood.  

Interior lighting has evolved exponentially in the last few years. For example, the use of centralised lighting control systems has allowed our clients to control all their abode’s lighting circuits through a single user interface or phone app. We highly recommend integrating one into the design of your home too.

Homeplay are award-winning specialists in beautiful home technology, masters at seamlessly integrating simple stylish systems into homes. Hill House Interiors have worked on a number of projects with Homeplay to integrate exceptional lighting systems into our clients’ homes. We invited Founder and Managing Director of Homeplay, James Ratcliffe, to share some of his expert advice:

“Good lighting can have a huge effect on the ambience of the room and the mood of the occupants. Firstly, the colour of the lighting should be paid attention to – cool colours tend to energise us and are good in the morning or in areas like studies and gyms, whereas warmer colours are better suited for afternoon/evening or areas of relaxation. We’re moving towards technology that is able to change colour temperature depending on the mood of the user of the time of day, which is wonderfully flexible. Luminaires – complete electric light units – should be selected with some consideration for CRI (colour rendering). This is the ability of a light source to accurately render the colour of an object – it’s often hugely underestimated how big an effect it can have on how the room feels! Always try and source luminaires with CRI of over 90 – many of the best these days are 98 or so (out of 100).”

“Ceiling coffers are a very popular way to bring a soft, indirect light into a room without any glare. The coffer can also be used to hide cabling and ventilation.”

“Lighting control is often associated with complexity, but done correctly it massively simplifies the operation of a modern lighting scheme. If you’ve got more than 2-3 zones or circuits of lighting in a room, being able to set the various lights to exactly the right level at the touch of a button is infinitely easier than fiddling around with a bank of switches or rotary dimmers. A simple wall push-button wall control with carefully engraved buttons make it clear how to quickly and easily set the lighting to how the user would like it, even to the most technophobic user,”

Decorative Lighting Inspiration

This handcrafted wall light installation elegantly cascading through three floors. The minimalist design of the curved clear glass staircase sets the base for this unforgettable wall installation. Inspired by the vine leaves of the Loire Valley, each piece is uniquely hand crafted by experienced French artisans and finished in a combination of finishes adding depth and tone.

A palette of soft bronze, blacks and warm whites have been used and various brush strokes and colour adorned to create deep interest. Vines can be found trailing off and leaves falling to recreate the beauty of nature reflecting the vines from late Spring to Autumn.