Interior Design Masterclass: Light Your Home
This lighting design masterclass shares everything you need to know to light your home efficiently and beautifully.
It explains all the key principles of residential lighting, and takes you through the practical process of producing a fully-resolved lighting proposal.
It provides advice for every room in your home, and suggests both permanent and temporary installations – solutions for home owners, and for home renters.
THIS CLASS COVERS:
- Types of lighting – general, task, accent, decorative and kinetic
- Layering lighting – applying light to dramatically model 3D surfaces and texture
- Inspirational and creative lighting – painting light into your home
- Colour temperature – how to get consistent colour in lighting
- Colour rendering – make the colours in your home sing out
- Shape of light – lines, pools, washes, spots, and how to achieve these effects
- Quantifying fittings – calculating light for all the different rooms of the home
- Lux, Lumen, foot-candles – metric and imperial measurements of lighting
- Light fittings – different types of lighting, including the hidden budget breakers
- Lamp choice – the many specifiable qualities of different light bulbs
- Controlling light – switches, circuits and dimming
- Surveying a room – how to record the dimensions of your home
- Creating a lighting plan – clearly communicate a complete scheme of lighting
- Drawings and documents – simple advice on the key parts of professional lighting proposals
The class project is to make a sketch lighting plan for a room in your home.
WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE THIS CLASS
Great lighting is the best gift you can give your home: it is transformational.
What’s the point of making a beautiful home if you don’t show it off. Good lighting is life-enhancing; it anticipates your needs, and supports daily routines by putting light in exactly the right place, and it creates beautiful, dramatic, creative, and relaxing environments.
I’m Julia, I am an interior designer, and a design lecturer. For more than 20 years I’ve split my career between design practice – including lighting design – and teaching at London’s top design school. My classes bring practical and clear step-by-step guidance, along with professional tips, tricks and short-cuts.
Your home is equal parts gallery, laboratory, theatre, and retreat, and it’s good lighting that helps you to create and switch the scenes.
This class assumes no prior knowledge and starts from the very beginning. It includes simply-explained technical elements; the principles you must know to get the very best out of your home lighting scheme.
Information is given in both metric and imperial measurements.
HOW TO TAKE THIS CLASS
The running time for the class videos totals nearly two hours. When you pop in exercises and you work to create a project (along with reading the class notes) you should actually allow at least 2-3 study days if you want to produce a bespoke sketch lighting plan for a room in your home.
As a first step, start by watching the whole class all the way through to the end. This will help you understand the scope of the class, and the context of the exercises and project.
Then, taking it slowly, start again at the beginning and watch again. This time stop to complete the short exercises.
Finally, when you feel you’ve digested the materials, when you feel comfortable, start work on your live project.
So, make sure to give yourself generous time for each stage, at least a couple of hours to survey your space, and a few more hours for ‘painting with light’ exercises, or for drafting a sketch lighting plan.
It would take an experienced lighting designer a day or so to work up a scheme for your home, so give yourself ample time – this way you’ll get the very best outcomes for using light to transform your home!
Introduction
Welcome to 'Light Your Home', a content-rich, creative, and inspirational guide to reviewing and upgrading your home lighting. You'll find the class notes - including advice for the individuals rooms in your home - available to download in this section. Discover the Mission Statement for this class, the goals we will return to in the Conclusion, showing how we've learned to design lighting like a pro!
How you engage with the class project is your personal choice. For smaller projects, working on top of photos is fine; for serious renovations or new build homes you might choose to complete a sketch lighting plan (plus photos too, if you have them).
Learning About Lighting
Lighting design advice 1.01: layer your lighting. Crosslight scenes with washes of light from different directions and planes. In this way you produce warmth and texture with casting harsh shadows and glare.
Learn about the 3 main categories of home lighting, and where they apply.
Develop a creative approach to applying light in your home using this handy thought experiment. Get past 'designer's block' by thinking of light as a liquid and paintable product.
Colour temperature dictates whether white light is tainted with blue or yellow. Actively choose the colour temperature of your white light and create a tailored and appropriate first impression.
Learn how to present colourful collections, art, and furnishings to be their most vibrant best!
Apply light confidently in lines, washes, floods, and spots. Pick and choose the shape of light to suit the style of your home.
Good quality fittings may offer optional extras; accessories that reduce glare, and that sculpt and shape the cast of light.
A quick review of the 4 main types of lamp commonly available, their pros and cons, and the hidden extras that could multiply the cost of a lighting installation.
How many lightbulbs do you need in a room? Learn how to calculate lighting needs and to translate this into numbers of fittings, in both metric and imperial measurements.
Apply the learning from this section of the class as part of a regular trip to a supermarket or DIY store.
In this lesson we look at switching and controlling light; creating different moods and scenes for different times of day, and days of the year.
Complete your knowledge of types of lighting by adding in the two final categories: kinetic and decorative.
No study of home lighting would be complete without an analysis of the impact of daylight throughout your home.
Find online inspiration for the very best lighting solutions by studying the work of the very best professionals.
Architects and designers cross-check design solutions by studying the ways your household uses your home: daily, weekly, monthly, annually. Take a leaf from the professional handbook and analyse your needs by mapping living rituals.
In this lesson we study multiple approaches to lighting multiple spaces, proving that there is no one 'right' solution, and that - when you rent, or can't commit to a major overhaul - most lighting needs can be met by portable fittings.
A study of the best commercial lighting often inspires creative lighting in the home.
The Class Project
If you don't have existing architect's plans for your home, this lesson advises on the process of measuring and recording the measurements of your chosen room.
If you don't have existing architect's plans for your home, you can use this approach to draw the scale sketches you'll need to work up a lighting plan. Don't forget to refer to the class notes, you'll find these in the introduction area of this class.
With scale drawings for your project space, it's now time to design a lighting scheme that meets general, task, and accent lighting needs.
Turn your conceptual lighting design into a working drawing; a tangible solution suggesting real fittings that physically create the spread of light you've crafted for your home.
Add the finishing touches to your plan - decide where and how you'll control your lighting scheme.
Here is a quick review of the lighting plan creation process.
Conclusion
You don't need to chase and channel walls and ceilings to create great lighting: great lighting can be applied by free-standing fittings, and using smart technology. Discover how all the wins available to homeowners working with electricians might also available to tenants working with landlords.
Time to review the Class Mission Statement, to reflect on just how agile a lighting scheme can be, and to recognise the power we have to create flexible solutions of practical and beautiful home lighting.
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