Months ago, I started considering the lighting plans for the house.
The lofted ceiling in the dining/kitchen space is a complicated shape, crossed with beams and posts, 4 meters tall, has a window, will have a ceiling fan, etc. It’s a real challenge to figure out how to create enough ambient light at night (a glow in the dark void above) and have good task lighting in the kitchen and dining spaces.
I spent a lot of time watching interior designers’ videos, taking mini-courses on lighting math, and browsing Pintrest for inspiration. I poured through the Odelic lighting catalog, checking for feasibilty and learning about different options. I came up with two plans, both complicated:
Tod doesn’t have a lot of requests for the house, but lighting is one of the places he has preferences: dimmable lights; sufficient task lighting in the kitchen. And because we disagree on color temperature for working, it is best if at least some key lights are adjustable from golden to blue.
When I went over these ideas with our electrician (who is wonderful and patient) I realised we’d need a lot of switches and dimmers. This makes everything even more complicated. A “smart” connected system sort of made sense. We could to program different lighting scenes like a theatre.
- Scene 1: early morning, coffee making.
- Scene 2: mid-morning, cleaning the house.
- Scene 3: evening, around the dinner table.
How cool would that be? A system like that would be fun to program and convenient to use.
But smart systems age ungracefully as technology advances. The smart lights we install in 2023 will be superseded by much better tech within a few years. However, we will be living with whatever we install now for quite a while. I have no intention of ripping out the lights and replacing them.
Alternately, we could put individual smart bulbs in regular fixtures and use remotes or apps to adjust the lights. That solves the locked-in tech problem, but means we’ll have a lot of remotes floating around.
While Tod was in Tokyo last month, I sent him off to the Odelic showroom to see fixtures in person and look at the range of connected systems and remotes available. And then I visited the Koizumi Lighting Showroom last weekend.
And that is when I decided to just simplify everything. A lot.
We’ll have three track/rail lights in the kitchen and dining room. A pair of up-facing spotlights on the 2nd floor wall to highlight the vaulted space. No downlights except in rooms with flat ceilings. No uplights on the beams. No built-in bedside lights.
No built-in smart systems. Dimming switches on some lights. But for many of the fixtures, adjustments will be done via smart bulbs and remotes/apps – all one manufacturer if possible.
Nothing is locked in yet, but it has to be decided soon. Fingers crossed that I got it right and we won’t have too many dreary dark spots in the house. There are plenty of outlets for lamps…
