Sarah and Bruce welcome Lucy Dearborn, owner of Lucia Lighting in Lynn, MA to talk all things lighting! From proper layering in kitchens to creating the right ambiance outdoors to the evolution of LED lighting, this lively discussion provides tips on how lighting might just be one of the most important design decisions for your home.
What makes for good lighting?
A really good friend of mine, Nancy Goldstein from Light positive, said to me once and it stuck with me forever – if a light specialist or lighting designer does a really good job nobody says anything about it. It is enhancing, accenting, and just elevating interior and exterior. You know, buy a $50,000 rug, shut the lights off, what good is it?
It also has something to do about how it makes people feel – Because if youre at a party….I’m having way more fun if they have me lit well. If you’re in there and you’re talking to someone and you can see the shadows it distracts me.
You know, a bathroom at a hotel is a really good. High end hotels have really good bathroom lighting. It kind of lights your whole face so you’re not feeling that downlight shadow. It’s giving you just enough of a glow but not so much brightness that theres a lot of information. So thats kind of, we take a lot of what we do, especially in bathrooms, from the hotel industry because they seem to do it the best. And that is really just lighting your whole face and kind of making you glow. So low level.
Thats very interesting, I caught the bit about, not showing too much information, now that seems to be about one’s face. What about the rest of the things that either are on the outside or inside of a building. Is there more infromation that you try to ring from things you are illuminating other than faces?
Absolutely. You have to think of the pandemic. People were using their dining room tables as desks, right? So a lot of calls we were getting were “I havent used my dining room in 20 years and now its my husbands office” so adding recessed lighting to amp up the light level. Even just those crazy little things you buy to light up your face for zoom calls. Lighting has really become, especially in the last two years really, much more important to people because they are using spaces in their home for things they never used it for before. So if you think about that, it’s really broaden peoples interest in lighting and multiused of spaces. So layers are super important.