Choosing lighting for your renovation can seem easy; just chuck in 8 downlights in the kitchen, 4 in the bedrooms and 6 in the living room? If you’re happy living in a house that feels as cold as a hospital! If only it was that easy!
A professional lighting plan, designed by an Interior Designer gives you a lot more than just downlighting, if you actually need them in the first place, and is designed to fit the way your family lives, take into account your seating, living and working spaces as well as your personal style and the design of your home.
Why Can't the Electrician Just Handle It?
Well, you can, but have you thought about how the room will feel? Do you want any pendant lights in that room – after all they are what you’ll notice and what will draw your eye when you enter the room? Did you discuss dimmers and the temperature of the bulbs you’ll use? Will your downlights be adjustable? What size will your downlights actually be? If you’ve thought about pendant lighting, do you know how long the cords should be? How strong the lumens are? What about mood lighting to ensure the space doesn’t feel like a hospital? Have you thought about outlets for that?
As you can see there is a LOT to consider when thinking about your lighting plan and it isn’t as simple as just chucking in a few downlights.
What does a Lighting Plan actually get me?
Our ‘Design & Plan Service’ can be utilised to create a lighting plan for your home and we promise the end result will not just look amazing, but will also feel amazing. When we meet together we’ll discuss your style and what type of lights you’ve been looking at; we’ll walk through your home and look at the current lighting situation and see just how it works for you and where you’d like to add or remove light; we’ll think about the rooms where ‘mood’ lighting is more important and those where you definitely need specific ‘task’ lighting and we’ll talk about how your family uses each space and what times they’re used.
The image (above right) is an example of one page of a Lighting Selection created for a client who required pendant lighting for a number of different areas in their home. Each pendant suggestion was allocated to an area for the client to look at and choose from.
Everything is cohesive and works beautifully throughout your home
The client had also chosen their large pendant to sit above the kitchen island and the design grew from that initial selection that client had made.
As you can see in the Lighting Plan Overview below, the wall, exterior, tile and additional paint colours are included so the client can reference these whilst choosing their preferences and it ensures the design scheme and materials will work from that perspective also.
The Lighting Plans (above) show a colour-coded location of the final choices made by the client and where they would be located so it became a quick and easy process for them to locate the lights on their floorplans when discussing these with trades.
With the exception of one feature light, the remainder were purchased from one supplier ensuring a very large trade discount of nearly 35% off RRP which gave the client extra money in their pocket to spend elsewhere! To ensure the entire process was seamless the order was checked for accuracy, made by us and then paid off in installments by the client who picked up selections when required by the project manager so nothing had to be stored onsite and put at risk of damage or being stolen in the meantime.
Was it worth the money?
Overall the client found this way of working very easy and took all of the stress out of trying to ensure their lighting was cohesive throughout the home from entry to bedrooms to bathrooms and any changes or upgrades they needed were handled by us immediately so all they needed to do was pay our invoice at the beginning of the project, make their installment payments with the supplier and let us know what they needed delivered and when.
Easy Peasy! So if you need your lighting upgraded and you don’t know where to begin or you need the lighting in your renovation designed, just get in touch and we can start the ball rolling and take a load off your mind!
