Lighting Your Way

Creative lighting is easy and a fun technique to generate the atmosphere you want. It can create a pool of light around a certain area creating an ambiance or enhance a mood in a room.

One of my fetishes is overhead lighting, particularly light fixtures that are flush with the ceiling. I don’t like them, feeling they were too harsh. Previously I typically filled my house with lamps instead. Then I discovered I like overhead “drop lighting”(my word) in entry ways, hallways or places I wanted to highlight.

A friend gave me (he called it a lifelong loan) a beautiful Italian chandelier with ceramic dogwood flowers and gold leafing. I would never have thought to purchase something thinking it would be too gaudy (much less something I could afford). I was pleasantly surprised how well it works in an area of my home, and now it is my focal point on the landing area between the three BNB guest bedrooms. Bonus: the gold leafing pulls the thin gold matting layer out of the triple matted framed Americana prints in that area. It finishes off the area where I have a guest “help-yourself” coffee, tea, treats, frig, and microwave refreshment center on the second floor.

It inspired me to find these two inexpensive basic wrought iron chandeliers that I personalized. On one, in the entryway on the way up to the stairs to the second floor, I put yellow forsythia found in my yard around the small dishes that support each electric candle evoking signs of spring for me. I will change out nature’s adornments with other seasonally flora.

And not to be left out, I even put

a chandelier up in my personal and

private bathroom/dressing area

adorned with simple lampshades.

The individual lights (from Ikea) above my bookshelf focuses in on a special reading haven.

I have a DIY kitchen chandelier: silverware attached to a Bundt pan that rests on a large round light bulb above the kitchen sink drawing the eye through this pass-through window/serving counter between kitchen and dining room. By the way, the bookshelf (on one side of my dining room) is maybe five feet from the kitchen pass-through window but the different lighting creates the illusion of a designated space in this area which is not very big in square footage yet draws the eye to it.

Check out the under and over lighting on the cabinetry in the kitchen. The cabinet lighting on the top illuminates further by the reflection from clear glass vases placed on top of the cabinets. I wash them every six months in my dishwasher to keep the reflection clean and shiny.

What space of your home could use a high-LIGHT effect to create that special atmosphere?

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