Lighting styles range from vintage to ultra-modern. Determine the theme of your room and try to match the style of your lighting to your home decor.
Lightings with clean lines, bold shapes, bright colors, and minimalist yet detailed designs are often considered modern. Minimal materials and striking geometric shapes enhance their modern feel.
Lightings with more decorative elements, ornate details, scrollwork, unusual curves, and vintage materials like bronze, brass, and wood often convey a classic, vintage, antique, or traditional feel.
You can choose to let your lighting blend into the background with a minimalist style or let it become a statement piece, adding sparkle to the room. A brightly colored lampshade or base can add a pop of color, or the lighting can simply serve its purpose, highlighting clean white, soft, or transparent materials.
Try picking a few primary or accent colors from the room's color scheme and using your lighting as a finishing touch to your interior design.
The light output of a lamp depends primarily on the intensity of the bulb, the amount of light that shines through the shade, and the placement of the lamp and its distance from the subject.
A bright lamp placed twice as far away from an object may not illuminate it as brightly as a dimmer lamp placed nearby. Light diffuses and appears dimmer as the distance from the light source increases. With this in mind, use nearby lamps to illuminate key areas, such as your favorite chair, and use more distant lamps for ambient light.
Floor lamps are typically the brightest lamps, typically 300 watts or more and containing three or more bulbs. This typically produces twice the output of a table lamp.
Reading lamps typically produce the second-brightest light because they are floor lamps with concentrated light positioned close to where you read.
How much light does a lamp emit?
Table lamps typically have an incandescent bulb output between 100 and 150 watts. Some table lamps may have a three-way bulb, allowing for dimmer brightness. Sometimes, table lamps may have two bulbs, providing brighter light, but require the use of a single bulb.
A table lamp may produce a similar amount of light to a dining table lamp, but it's concentrated in a more concentrated area above the table, making it appear brighter overall.
Accent lights are the dimmest of all lamps and typically use only 7-watt or similar bulbs. They can enhance a room's ambiance or add nightlight functionality, but they're not bright enough to illuminate an entire room or accomplish everyday tasks.
Tip for increasing lamp brightness: One way to increase lamp brightness within safe limits is to replace incandescent bulbs with fluorescent or LED bulbs. Because these modern bulbs have a much lower wattage than regular bulbs, you can install higher-equivalent/wattage bulbs, which can produce more light than a standard bulb without exceeding its rated wattage. However, be sure not to use any bulbs with a wattage higher than the bulb's maximum rated wattage.
