Lighting Design by Master Interior Designer Steven C. Adamko
Home Lighting Design To Enhance The Look, Feel, Mood, And Ambience of Any Home
Now You Can Get Lighting Design and Selection that Integrates and Orchestrates with Your Home and Lifestyle
Lighting Design and Selection done right will provide the plan that integrates and orchestrates with Your Home and Lifestyle … and will provide You with a cohesive presentation, that supports you mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Proper lighting design is a superb expressive medium that will yield fantastic results under the guidance of the combined lighting artist and master interior designer, Steven C. Adamko, who can definitively enhance your home environment, furnishings, and decorations.
Properly designed lighting enhances the mood of a room and, even more, it is the dominating influence in creating the mood in many cases. For by varying the lighting effect or effects, the expression of a room may be altered at will.
Unfortunately, those who are associated with lighting in the home such as many builders, interior designers, and interior decorators, seldom look beyond the fixtures to the effects upon the mood and expression of the room, rooms, or the entire home. They are Not trained in the total orchestration of a home environment. Everything in the home to be enjoyed and experienced is based on the proper use and manipulation of light.
“Painting with light” is not merely a metaphorical phrase; it is accomplished by the lighting artist who understands the effects of lightning in the total scheme of things, as it relates to the envisioned ambience. If the homeowner will consider lighting as seriously as they do decoration and furnishing, they will find lighting design by a master interior designer such as myself, a powerful ally in making a house a phenomenal and amazing home.
Properly designed lighting enhances the mood of a room, and even more, it is the dominating influence in creating the mood. By varying the lighting effect, the expression and emotional context of a room may be altered at will.
Artificial light is not a pure utility … and until the homeowner recognizes its potentiality as an artistic, or more broadly, a psychological medium, he or she will not thoughtfully and adequately provide the wiring and fixtures necessary to extract the complete joy from it. This is were the Lighting Designer/Master Interior Design comes in to provide the details and the total orchestration in the home environment, in order to extract the maximum effect that will provide the visual, emotional, and aesthetic satisfaction that You need and desire.
Lighting Affects Your Emotions!
Without light, your most important and educative sense, that being sight, becomes useless. You are as blind without light as you are without sight.
Light does not merely reveal things to us. It is responsible for much of the beauty of this world. The attitude, the sensibility; the intelligence, and the culture of an individual depends on the ability to sense the beauty in this world. Light supplies the material essential. It models sculpture; it breathes life into the inanimate pigments of paintings; it gives expression to the work of the designer and decorator. In fact, it is responsible for the “magical drapery” which spreads over all creation and appeals to the human consciousness through the doorway of vision.
It is a medium not as material and physical as the media of artists, but it has greater potentiality, because it gives life to the media of artists, and it possesses the superb property of mobility.
Color is How You Light It
Objects have the ability to reflect certain components of light and to absorb others. That is why an object appears red, because it reflects only these rays. A white or gray object appears of the true color of the light source because it is neutral; that is, it reflects all components equally well. A slight appreciation of this aspect of light is necessary if one is to be able to appreciate and utilize light understandingly.
The source of the light determines the color of the objects that you perceive. The same object looks different under florescent lighting than incandescent lighting. They also look different under different kinds of florescent lighting such as cool white or warm white.
Each change of light source changes the color you perceive, while the object itself never changes. Therefore, Color is how you light it!
Lighting Effects … Affect You! … for Better or Worse … The Good and The Bad
By illustrating the possibilities of lighting and showing the depth of the influence of light, it becomes apparent to emphasize again and again that the lighting effects are the important results; and, thereby showing that light is a wonderful medium to be handled in a manner similar to that in which the artist handles his media and paints, in order to achieve the end result.
A common practice, which is unfortunate, is the concentration of attention on the lighting fixtures, to the exclusion of the lighting effects on the interior design. The manufacturers designer designs the fixtures; the lighting dealer or lighting store sells them; the homeowner purchases them. Most fixtures are aimless from the viewpoint of lighting. Many of them are merely objects … sometimes beautiful objects … fabricated from metal, glass, and other materials. The lighting fixture dealer sells them usually without consideration for the lighting effects that are needed for the ambience of the particular room for which they are intended.
Fixture salespeople do not often discuss lighting or demonstrate the lighting effects of their selections. Nor can they enunciate or elaborate the total effect it will have in the interiors. Why? Because they are not master interior designers. They don’t have total command of the environment from beginning to end. They are “Players in the Orchestra” Not “Orchestra Conductors.”
But when You are dealing with lighting, You can never forget that much of the expressiveness and success of your decorative schemes have their dependence upon light. So many people center their attention upon the fixture, and although they may select an object of beauty, they generally do not consider its lighting effect upon the room. Of course, fixtures have a right to exist as beautiful objects, but the lighting effect in the room as a whole is of prime importance, because it can be a subtle and powerful psychological influence.
The Importance of LIGHT as an EXPRESSIVE MEDIUM
IF the potential possibilities of artificial light are to be enjoyed in the home, it is essential that the homeowner and others responsible for lighting broaden their view of the powers of light.
Many details and principles are involved in home-lighting, but there is one rule which must be emphasized again and again, namely, that lighting effect—the final effect upon the expression of the room—is overwhelmingly important.
Lighting fixtures in general should be considered as links in the chain … from the electric meter to the eye, that is, they are means to an end. Being visible, the appearance and effect of the lighting is of more importance than the concealed wiring, but the greatest drawback to seeing wonderful results in lighting has been the concentration of attention upon the lighting fixtures themselves.
Most people, when asked to appraise the lighting of a given room, immediately turn their attention to fixtures, instead of viewing the room as a whole. This tendency of looking at the fixtures only may be utilized occasionally, but it does not result in a true or adequate appraisal of the lighting effect. There are isolated cases when a portable lamp, a wall-bracket, a ceiling-fixture, or a lighting novelty is of prime importance for itself as a vital spark of ornamentation, but this is usually the exception or the secondary function of fixtures.
In order to appreciate fully the importance and possibilities of light in the home, it is necessary to acquire a full conception of what may be termed the “expressiveness of light.”
Great strides will have been made as soon as You conceive of light as a medium. It doesn’t matter what material characteristics are conceived concerning it, the important aspect is to think of it as a medium similar to such media as pigments, paints, wallpapers, floorcoverings, etc. For example, a gray surface may be increased in brightness or relative value by increasing the amount of light reflected from it. This may be done in two ways, namely, by making it more reflecting and by supplying it with more light. A gray may be made more reflecting by adding white to it. In either case light is of primary importance.
To summarize this entire viewpoint of lighting, the metaphorical phrase “painting with light” appears most appropriate. This does not include only the tinted lights, but also the distribution of light which determines the general arrangement of light and shade, or values. The broadest and perhaps the simplest concept of lighting from the decorative, aesthetic, or, more broadly, the psychological and emotional standpoint is to consider light as a medium, which, guided by the artistic instinct of the lighting artist, is capable of casting over an interior, a magical drapery of light, shade, and color of far greater effectiveness and mobility than the media employed by the interior decorator or interior designer.
Every person in the decorating and furnishing of a home artistically needs to be aware of the great potentiality of excellent lighting desig. It is very profitable and beneficial to anyone to remove the veil of indifference or unconsciousness from their eyes and observe and analyze the expressions of light on every hand. It is a fascinating thought which not only leads to the conception of the powers of light, but opens the doorway to a magical world that will enrich your home environment … to be seen and enjoyed by everyone who crosses the threshold of you home.
How it Really Happens in the Professional World ... A Summary
In the real professional world this is the way it happens. There is a discussion about how all the room or home should look and feel. This factors very strongly into the ambiance of the environment.
To do an adequate residential design job entails a reflected ceiling plan. This is just like the floor plan but showing the ceiling and not the floor. The furniture layout is critical to knowing where to place recessed lighting cans, pendant fixtures, and track lighting as well as floor outlets and wall outlets.
It’s important goal above and beyond electrical code requirements. That means having outlets behind it and tables and night stands for instance. There’s no sense in having a beautiful interior design and then having to see lamp cords showing on the wall connecting to the wall outlet. It’s like getting all dressed up and not making sure that stray threads are not hanging out or the clothing tag is not been talked in. That would be an embarrassing situation for most women.
What I wrote above, also factors into wiring and switching. What switches and what types of switches are going to control which fixtures.
No fixture by itself lights the room. It’s the lamp or the bulb, as most laypeople would call it that does all the work. This gets in two color temperature of the bulb, the type of bulb, beam spread, intensity, and the desired foot candles on a table surface, wall surface, painting, or sculpture.
No fixture by itself lights the room. It’s the lamp or the bulb, as most laypeople would call it that does all the work. This gets in two color temperature of the bulb, the type of bulb, beam spread, intensity, and the desired foot candles on a table surface, wall surface, painting, or sculpture.
It’s also very important to have a concept and a handle on the ultimate effect or effects that are needed and desired in any environment.
All this needs to be done in the early stages of a design along with the architectural plans before the builder starts his work.
