Lighting design and layout in Woodside, NY

The three layers

Task light is light you do something by: a worktop, a desk, a reading chair, a mirror. It wants to come from in front of or beside you rather than from directly overhead, because overhead light puts your own shadow on your work. Under-cabinet lighting in a kitchen is the clearest example, and it is the single change that most improves a Queens kitchen.

Ambient light fills the room so it does not read as a pool of task light in a dark box. It can come from downlights, but it is often better bounced — off a ceiling, off a wall — because reflected light is softer and flatters faces.

Accent light gives the eye somewhere to rest: a wall grazed, a picture lit, a shelf. It is the layer that makes a room feel finished, it is the one people leave out, and it is usually the cheapest of the three.

What we do before anything is cut

We come and look at the room in daylight and in the dark, because they are different rooms. We ask what happens in it and where people actually sit, which is frequently not where the furniture plan says.

Then a layout: what goes where, what is on which switch, what dims and what does not, and what colour temperature. Where it is worth doing, we will put temporary fittings up so you can see the effect before we cut a hole in a ceiling — which is a small amount of work and prevents the one mistake that cannot be undone cheaply.

The design fee is credited against the installation. If you take the layout and have somebody else fit it, that is fine and the drawing is still yours.

Colour temperature, and the mistake everybody makes

The most common regret is light that is too cold. A neutral or cool white looks crisp in a shop and clinical in a living room, and it is very hard to un-see once it is up.

For domestic rooms we generally use a warm white, and we keep it consistent — mixing colour temperatures within one sightline is the thing that makes a room feel subtly wrong without anybody being able to say why. Kitchens and workshops can take something slightly cooler on the task layer. We will show you the difference on site rather than describe it in numbers.