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Dressing Up the Home |
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ShowtimeSimple lighting techniques can make your homes and your buyers look good.
It's relatively easy to choose those touches if you remember that people think of their homes not just as a place to live but as something to show off to friends. The home is the stage, and the homeowners are more than mere actors: They're the stars of the show. And one way to wow them is with lighting that makes them and their homes glow rather than wither. A good place to start is in the kitchen. "The lighting in most kitchens makes people look 10 years older," says Chicago lighting designer Jennifer Gray. The main culprit: the ubiquitous incandescent down light, which tends to cast harsh facial shadows. A better approach might be a combination task lighting to illuminate work surfaces, along with indirect ambient lighting. "Indirect down lighting provides better facial modeling. It's stage lighting." Some lighting designers predict that buyers of production homes will soon start to expect the thoughtful use of indirect light. That's already the case in the custom home market, says Dr. Susan Hakkarainen, president of Ivalo Lighting, Inc. To satisfy this expectation, Hakkarainen has designed sculptural fixtures that provide a combination of direct and indirect lighting to create the best stage possible for living. Many of these new fixtures use fluorescent bulbs, which have the added advantage of creating a relatively soft light. "Fluorescent light is an efficient indirect light, which doesn't put shadows in your eyes,” Hakkarainen says. “A good balance in a room is 30 percent direct incandescent and 70 percent indirect fluorescent." Direct light still has its place: to provide touches of drama for the stage. It doesn't take many of these touches to make a home stand out. Anne Kustner, a lighting designer from Evanston, Ill., says that builders can get a big return on illumination by placing in-floor up lights at entrances and hallways. "We have been using these at the base of columns to provide drama and pop," she says. She adds that placing in-floor lights inside and outside an entrance can provide a unifying theme that adds to a home’s value. Of course, one reason builders give scant attention to lighting is that prospective buyers tend to look at homes during the day. But you can draw their attention to the lighting by having your model home professionally photographed at night and prominently displaying the images in the model. You should also consider fixtures that look good even when turned off. Hakkarainen says that many wall sconces don't look good in the day, and her company has worked to change that. "We design fixtures to look like sculpture by day and with beautiful glow animating them at night," she says. Good lighting can be made even better with good controls, and Kustner predicts that improvements in lighting controls will make them more of a staple in production homes in the next couple of years. "Controls are getting thinner and more cost-effective, so they will be used more frequently," she says, adding that companies like LiteTouch now make controls that fit in one switch box but can control up to eight lights. "These controls don't crowd the wall, and they give homeowners the ability to set lighting scenes and turn off all the lights from one point." So, when company shows up at the door, it will be easy for the homeowners to direct the show they're starring in.
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