What are the do’s and don’ts of creating a lighting scheme for your home? Interior designer Brandon Schubert offers some invaluable insights on how to curate a lighting scheme that works for every room. What’s the most important rule of lighting design? What temperature should your bulbs be? Why are dimmer lights essential? Watch our episode of ‘Tricks of the Trade’ as Brandon Shubert answers all of these questions and more.
#InteriorDesign #Tutorial #Lighting
00:00 – Lighting your home
00:46 – Sitting room
02:55 – Kitchen & dining space
05:55 – Bedroom
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– When we got married, I
took a box of light bulbs to the hotel and made them
change all the light bulbs. [camera person laughing] Hi, I’m Brandon Schubert. I’m an interior designer,
and today I’m gonna show you how to design and execute a
lighting scheme for your home. [upbeat music] I love designing lighting for interiors. First of all, the room has to
work, so you need function, but more importantly, lighting
gives the room its energy and its atmosphere once
the sun has gone down. We’re here today at a
project in South London that I designed to look
at the lighting schemes, how we’ve designed them, and how they work in each given space. Let’s look at lighting a sitting room. I always start a lighting
design with a floor plan. If you don’t have a professional
floor plan like we do, you can always sketch
something out on graph paper or with a scale rule if you want. Someone told me once that the most important
rule of lighting design is to light objects and
surfaces, not space. There’s something about
seeing a room from above that allows you of visualize the objects you’re trying to light rather than the space as
you’re standing there. The other thing to think about is lighting different levels of a room. So we have ceiling lights,
which are above your head. We might have wall lights at eye level, and we might have table
lamps at below eye level, but it’s important to get
lighting at all of those levels so that a room feels natural and immersive when you’re
standing in it at night. These two lights by the bookcase, they’re washing the front
of the bookcase down so that you get a glow
on the books themselves rather than just pointing at the ground. [upbeat music continues] The two decorative wall lights either side are giving you a really subtle glow, and in fact, I put a very
low wattage bulb in those, and I also have put a
gold line shade on them so that they just give
you a warm hint of light, but they’re not doing anything really. They’re just giving you ambient light. I’ve got a track running on the
horizontal side of this wall all the way down one side so that those lights can
point at the wall opposite, so they’re providing that
surface with a glow at night. I love table lamps, you know, I could buy table lamps all day. I spend my days on eBay, buying up vases and
turning them into lamps. It’s one of the joys of my design career. Think about them as a great accessory for making your lighting
scheme feel varied and feel decorative because they have great decorative value in addition to being a source of light. The floor lamp by the chair
is giving you the ability to sit there and read
a book in the evening, and it’s also giving you height in what would otherwise
be a fairly empty corner. I’ve also put a large floor lamp by this easy chair in the corner because again, you want that
height to fill the space. [upbeat music continues] Now we’re gonna look at lighting
a kitchen and dining space. It’s very often the case that your kitchen and a
dining space are connected, so we think about lighting
those two elements together. When you’re lighting a kitchen, the first thing to think
about is task lighting. Kitchens are all about function. In a kitchen, I use
downlights to light a surface that we’re gonna be using to work. So if you think about a
kitchen island, for example, it is important that that
island be lit uniformly and it be lit from more than one direction so you don’t end up with
uncomfortable shadows that get in your way when
you’re trying to work. Because this is quite a narrow room, we can’t really have table lamps and other decorative
fittings on that side. So again, I’ve settled
for recess downlights shining on those walls
just to give them a glow. And here as well. When you’re buying a downlight,
you oftentimes have a choice of getting a fixed downlight
or getting one that will tilt, and it’s much better to
wash a wall with light than it is just to pour
light down onto the floor. But what do you do when you wanna set the
mood for a dinner party or an evening where
you’re having friends over and people are going to
be in the connected room looking at the kitchen? I’ve used under counter lighting
under the cupboards above. If possible, I use LED strips
and I like to position them at the front edge of the cupboards above so that they don’t cast a funny shadow when they shine down on the
splashback behind the worktop. And running along the top
lighting up onto the ceiling, they can both be turned
down on a dimmer switch to just provide a soft glow
that just accentuates the room without lighting it up brightly. So in the dining room,
again, we’re gonna start with the furniture plan as
the driver of where things go. Clearly, the dining table’s
in the center of the room and we want a pendant
over the dining table. What I like about this light
is not only does it have a lot of character as an
antique light fitting, but these Vaseline glass
shades hide the bulbs a bit and soften the light, giving
it a little bit more moodiness, a little bit more diffuse character. Dimmers are especially
important in a dining room. You always want to be able to turn that central light
over the dining table down to a very low level when
you’re having a meal. We then have space for furniture all the way around the outside. So we have two pieces of furniture, either side of the chimney breast, and a sideboard running along this wall. So I’ve taken the opportunity
to put table lamps on each of those pieces of furniture. The other thing I think about
all the time with table lamps is the size and shape that they are. I try not to put a very heavy table lamp
on a very small table because I think it’s outta proportion. If you can get the balance
into the right place where the table lamp sits comfortably on the thing that it’s on,
it will feel more natural. That’s all the light fittings
we have in this room. Table lamps and the central
light over the dining room. That said, there’s plenty of opportunity to bring in candles and
other kinds of lights when the mood requires. Let’s talk about how to light a bedroom. I think anytime you enter a
room, you want a light switch that operates at least
one light in a room, and bedrooms are no different. So in this bedroom, I’ve
started with a ceiling light, which I positioned in
the center of the room. By the way, an interesting way to find the center of a room if you’re
in doubt, is to draw a line from one corner to the
other corner in a diagonal and then draw another
diagonal line from that corner to the other corner, which
ignores a chimney breast. And one of the things people often mistake is they take the center
line from the chimney breast to the other wall rather
than doing it with an X. So I started with a central
ceiling light in this room, I’ve also added a five amp circuit to control the lamps in this room. This is a way that you can
control table lamps by a switch. I’m making a small symbol,
which is for a five amp socket, showing how those lamps would be switched. And we put two bedside lamps
either side of the bed, and these are not operated
on the five amp circuit. They’re switched on the lamps themselves. The choice of light
bulbs is super important to the way a table lamp or
any light fitting works. I personally like most table lamps to be on a lower wattage bulb so that they’re just
providing a warm yellow glow. I also really pay attention
to color temperature. I really try to avoid anything above 2,700 degrees Kelvin,
I stay away from 3,000, and I definitely stay away from 4,000 because they put out a cold blue light that just isn’t inviting. [upbeat music continues] In this small bedroom, which
is a cozy, intimate space I wanted to make sure we got a variety of different types of lights. In this room in terms of circuits, I’ve broken the ceiling
light and the wall lights up. You can turn those wall lights on, so that they greet people
as they come up the stairs, and it isn’t just a dark room, but it equally isn’t a fully lit room. I’ve also put a single bedside
lamp between the single beds, which is not switched at the door, but is instead switched
on the lamp itself. With a bedside lamp, the
height is super important. You don’t want to be distracted
by the glare of a light bulb as you’re trying to
read your book at night. So you size the table lamp according to the height of the bed, the height of the bedside table, and the position of the
person who’s gonna be reading. [upbeat music continues]
31 Comments
0:45 What's the point of having such a big coffee table if you can't even put a coffee cup on there? Am I missing something?..
FOR ONCE SOMETHING USEFUL omg I noted down like I'm at school. The cross over in middle room to find center of room was news to me always struggled finding right position for ceiling lamps and the led lighting FORWARD under kitchen cabinet not back like I see many people do was genius
8:20 even the white credit looks like a part of lighting design.
This was excellent. The best instruction for DIYers in such a short bit of time. Perfect!
Thank you Brandon!
Where are those 1:56 sconces from anyone knows?
The information was good but his impression of Moira Rose from the Schitt's Creek tv show was distracting.
too much white/warm light for me. I just want daylight and visibility all over.
Lighting IS LIFE! Ahhmm everything!
Alexa, turn on lights. "Got it, turning on 7638 lights"
Best! I love it! ❤
Seriously? Learnt NOTHING!
As someone taking on a new build, this was so incredibly helpful!
Is there lighting a bathroom?
Interesting take on the light bulb color. For me, 2700 is a little too moody/gloomy. 3000k is just cheerful enough to not be gloomy, without going blue and cold like 4000k and above do. Side note, loved the rotary dial phone on the console table!
What about during the day? if the same homes don't get much natural daylight? Will you still be happy with a dimly lit living room?
Warm white🎉🎉
This type of design is why restaurants are too dim to read the menu. It's probably just on account of the way this was filmed and staged, but that kitchen looks too dark to comfortably work in at night!
Excellent content, I would love to see this as a lighting series covering other areas of a home such as bathrooms, entryways, stairs, office space, house exterior, landscape lighting, etc..
https://www.youtube.com/@HomePlora
Great video. Loved it
Wonderful informative
Wes Anderson
I already knew I loved Brandon's interiors, but this really made me appreciate how he thinks about and articulates his work. Great video, House & Garden–more of Brandon and his projects please!!
Thank you 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾❤️
I didn't know Ralph Fiennes had gone into interior design 😛
Excellent advice, hopefully I can apply it!
Video on turning vases into lamps please?
No television in this house?
this video really help me
Very good/usefull way
Is it just me or there isn't much light in those spaces?!
The bedroom for example, around 8:05.. if you wish to dress up for the evening you can't event see the color of your socks, so sucks..
Definitely it is a nice mood light but not a working one.
Great video but it seems like they are living in darkness after the sun goes down.