Guest post: Home Lighting

If you are a lover of home lighting and just know that every colour has it’s own temperature and each room conveys its own feeling and emotions, then you need to be thinking about bulbs.

The relatively unsexy and lets be honest ‘dull’ light bulb is often an overlooked part of home and interior lighting design.

Technology has moved on and LED lighting has changed a lot of lighting designs.

More and more LED lit light fittings are appearing in product ranges all the time.Major UK designer Franklite confirmed their plans to me this week on Twitter: “Ultimately LED is the way to go.”

These once costly-to-make lights do make energy saving differences and their incandescence when lit is unique.

All White for 2013?

A lot of  designers are  talking about white in 2013 and how it will be incorporated into backgrounds. The Pantone charts for next year do have lots of white and crème variants. So expect to see it feature heavily in designs next year.

The excellent  Laura Bielecki is well worth looking up she did a sneak peak into design trends back in September.

White is great with LED lighting, the main difference with LED and conventional bulbs is that they emit light in one direction and not in the all round way of a standard bulb. This makes them perfect for feature focus and for softening blocks of colour in a room.

This year we saw a lot of manufactures and designers creating ranges of paired wall lighting some simple and some striking in their design. Paired lights make a great alternative to overhead lighting and lamps, and of course are ideal for the classic dimmer switch.

The materials used to make lamp shades was a big focus for designers in 2012 some exquisite frosted glass, paper and metal designs appeared. Check Out the Foscarini range to get an idea.

We can expect to see this influence filter into high streets and stores next year. In particular companies like Franklite have come up with a range of overhead lighting with large metallic shades.

Fun, whimsy and romance seem to be all part of the design vogue for next year. Somewhere along the line design and home crafts are set to meet in your home.

So have fun experimenting with lighting, one of the tricks of the trade is to draw a room map to experiment where furniture and lighting can be placed to best effect. From there you can work out how a room will actually be used and how you would like to light it.

Images credited to www.franklite.net

Author Bio
My name is Simon and I run Easylighting.co.uk from my base in Norfolk a little place called Long Stratton you have probably never heard of. We are a home lighting specialist and do all our business on line.

Our tenth anniversary is at the end of November we wanted to do something special for our customers.  From Monday the 26th November through to Saturday 24th we will be giving away lighting on our Facebook page.  

Swivel chair

This is utterly perfect. I need it in my life. £549 from Made.com

Want: Jersey Sofa

This sofa is £299 and I can just envision it in our conservatory next to the book case. It would give it a well needed pop of colour and it looks comfortable too. We have that money in our savings. Can I buy it. Please?

I know we should pay off all the things we've already bought but I want this. It's from the glorious, wonderful, brilliant Made.com

Buying furniture

Having bigger rooms and, indeed, new rooms. It's about time we bought some more furniture. I have plans for a reading corner in the conservatory. So Ben and I popped to Homebase to procure a bookcase. We found a lovely flatpack one for £50.

We went into the store to have a look around. After much deliberation and purchasing something else on a whim (more about that below) we came away with a bookcase. We put it together last night and it looks great in the conservatory. We just need to unpack our remaining books into it.

The impulse buy

Whilst looking around the furniture section we saw a lovely extending dining table that came with six chairs. It was reduced from £750 to £429 and if we bought it on a Homebase card then we'd get an extra 20% off. Seemed perfect.

Upon saying we wanted to buy it we found out it was no longer available for delivery but they'd check in the warehouse. Table came up as did four chairs. That was all the chairs they had but we were told we might be able to take two display chairs.

Another problem soon arose. There were no legs for the table. They should've been in another box but our Homebase and the one down the road didn't have them. We were a bit baffled by this but we were told it was probably because a table was repaired with those legs sometime in the past.

We were then offered the whole display set with six chairs but the table was quite badly damaged. We told the store manager no and that we'd just take the bookcase.

He then said that if we looked through the catalog he might be able to do us a deal on another table we liked.

Of course, I stopped on the massive, solid oak £750 table with six amazingly shaped chairs. Worth a try.

We eventually got the table, six charcoal fabric chairs and the bookcase for £540 including delivery. Solid oak rather than oak veneer, stunning chairs and a cheaper bookcase. Homebase were very helpful and the manager did us an amazing deal. Can't wait for the table to arrive!

Beautiful Modern Thing

While researching items for magazine I came across Beautiful Modern Thing and was blown away by their products and website. It's relatively new venture, all powered by the brilliant Sweetpea & Willow. Take a look at the website, they've got some lovely stuff on offer.

Here are a few of my favourites, just click on the image to go to the product page.

Le Superflu

I was scrolling through the wonderul Decor8 blog when I came across an interview with the owner of Le Superflu, a gorgeous jewellery shop in Hannover. Some of the images are truly inspirational but this really caught my eye...

What a fantastic idea! I don't intend to go to Hannover any time soon but this shop looks exquisite! To see all the images and to read the fantastic interview with Owner Doris Meier go to the Decor8 post.

I was thinking of displaying my jewellery on a fancy coat rack of some sort but this is an ingenious and free idea!