The living room is the busiest room in the house, often right after the kitchen. When you leave work, you are already thinking about your living room and your nice comfortable sofa that you’ll dive into as soon as you get home. The moment your door closes behind you and you take a deep breath, leaving the outside world outside, you realize how magical your front door is.
This is why light plays a fundamental role in the whole house, but even more so in your living room.
Of course, there are a few elements that you should pay attention to so that your living room can be a warm and welcoming environment with the help of proper lighting.
The living room is also very special because it expresses your personality and tastes. Therefore, the lighting must your style as precisely as possible.
Proper lighting manages to highlight who you are in your home, making your living room the perfect welcoming environment for you. You can spend your free time in the living room and welcome guests and friends. It’s also perfect for when you are looking for some peace and quiet from your everyday life.
Let's take a look at some possible associations between personality and illumination:
- If you love to read and invest your free time—or your working life—in the company of books, your living room will certainly be furnished mainly with bookcases and a comfortable armchair to read on. In this context, you will need to have direct lighting available so that you can read comfortably and lights around or near the bookshelves to illuminate them properly.
- If you like to enjoy your cozy sofa in front of a good movie or TV series, most likely you will have installed a TV that matches your idea of comfort. In this case, you should use mood lighting and soft lighting.
- If you are a very sociable person and love to host relatives and friends, you will need several scattered points of light so that you can define the space and, depending on the situation, give your living room the right atmosphere.
These are just some of the countless examples that clearly show how much light is necessary for the sensory perception and well-being of those who live in a space that is used so much.
What are the 5 perfect lamps for living room lighting?
We have seen how lighting must blend perfectly with the type of living room and reflect your personality to make you feel truly at home and allow you to enjoy your time in a pleasant and comfortable way.
Now let’s take a look at the perfect lamps for illuminating the living room, starting with the examples mentioned above.
If you have a living room with lots of bookcases and an armchair for reading, you cannot do without a reading lamp, which can be a floor lamp, perhaps with adjustable arms or an elegant arc lamp.
Ululì-Ululà
Of course, your bookcases will also need to be highlighted, using accessory lights or designer wall lamps.
If, on the other hand, your living room is dedicated to movies and TV series, an LED backlight may be suitable, or a pair of designer table or floor lamps strategically positioned near the TV. These lamps won’t disturb your vision; on the contrary, lights near the tv can make your viewing even better, especially for your eyes.
Notredame
A living room used for hospitality must be able to create different atmospheres depending on the situation.
In this case, you can use
- a lamp for the dining table, a floor lamp or wall lamp—perhaps with dimmer—that can create a soft light to make the living room pleasant, relaxing, and welcoming for chatting with friends
- more decisive light for family days, through well-illuminating general lighting, using a beautiful designer suspension lamp. If you have large spaces or an open space, you can also install more than one.
Moby Dick
In general, we can say with some certainty that to create the ideal lighting for a welcoming living room, you need to keep 3 simple tips in mind:
- use wall lights and floor lamps, or a system of self-propelled spotlights to be positioned according to your needs
- to create a comfortable reading corner, use a floor lamp with adjustable arms or accessory accent lights. If your living room includes a corner sofa, you can also choose to place a table lamp between the two.
- set up some LED lamps to customize the atmosphere based on the situation.
The latest generation of systems, for example, allows you to adjust not only the intensity but also the color of the light so that you can create different environments with different atmospheres at different times of the day.
As already mentioned, these are just some examples and tips. There are so many different possibilities for illuminating the living room.
In any case, we have been able to draw up guidelines to give you a more precise and knowledgeable idea of the perfect lamps to illuminate your living room properly.
Snoob
Lighting for the atmosphere and also the furnishings
As you know, light has the power to influence the visual perception of space, so it is a wise decision to use it to make the perception of your living room warmer and more welcoming.
The most frequently asked questions regarding the use of light in relation to the visual perception of space are always addressed to 2 types of living rooms: how do I make a small living room larger? and How do I make a large living room welcoming?
To answer these two crucial questions in the most precise and functional way, we can consult the furnishing strategies, as well as lighting.
To make a small living room larger, you can use the following "tricks":
- play with light colors, which give a sense of openness
- insert a large mirror, which offers the optical illusion of a greater range of angles, resulting in a wider perception of the perspective of the living room
- minimal furniture: a few pieces of furniture on the floor, a couple of sofas that are not too big and a low table. This will be enough to create more visual space.
Sisma
Obviously, together with these points, you have to combine the right lighting, which can include wall lamps, LED ceiling lights, or directional spotlights. In this way, you can create the right atmosphere by using the walls and ceiling to illuminate the environment, avoiding occupying space with bulky installations.
On the contrary, to make a very large living room welcoming, you must try to "break up" the space with different light points and play with rugs and furniture to outline the spaces and create different functional corners.
Therefore, concerning lighting, you can resort to some solutions:
- a suspension lamp installed above a fairly large dining table
- a couple of floor lamps, perhaps with dimmers, in the area where you have set up the sofa and TV
- non-aggressive general lighting, which can flood the whole room with light delicately, to make a living room more welcoming, like a modern and designer suspension lamp or even a classic chandelier
Another very frequent question we get about making the living room more welcoming is: ceiling lamps or floor lamps?
The answer is simple: both are fine.
Alì e Babà
Let's see why both solutions are suitable for creating a welcoming atmosphere:
- the ceiling lamp provides general lighting, to which you can have fun associating one or more light points, such as wall lights, accessory accent lights, and also the competing floor lamp.
- The advantage of the floor lamp is its function not only as a lighting fixture but also as a furnishing accessory, because a designer floor lamp enriches the style of your living room.
Therefore, you can match a lamp with the furniture, or you can decide to "break up" the environment by inserting a designer lamp, whether it is a ceiling lamp or a floor lamp, but you can do it with all the lighting fixtures you decide to include in your living room.
The design of the lighting fixtures is very important; it can be an excellent strategy to divide up the environments. You can use one style for the living room area where the sofa and TV are located, another for the reading area, and another for the dining table area.
Therefore, in principle, the more areas your living room provides, the more possibilities you have to differentiate by playing on the design.
You can also decide to give a continuity of style between the various areas through the wise use of a unique design.
Moby Dick
Give a voice to your instincts, too!
Having seen the various guidelines to illuminate your living room in the best way and the perfect lamps for this purpose, we can say that the principle you should follow to give your living room the profile and atmosphere you have in mind is to choose the lamps on instinct.
By following the indications seen so far as the rational basis of your choices, you can let your instincts do the rest.
The points analyzed offer you that rational basis that "extinguishes" your rational concerns about which lamps are perfect for illuminating your living room. No longer having to worry about the technical part, you can relax and give voice to your instincts, allowing yourself the luxury of being free to choose based on your gut feeling.
Your living room communicates with you, arousing certain emotions: the right balance between rational functionality and emotional instinct will guide you in choosing the most suitable lighting fixtures for you, both in a technical and design sense.
