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A supermodel at work -Courtesy Theodore's Contemporary Furniture |
Judith Capen hopped up from the candlelit table and popped
on the overhead light. Suddenly, ghoulish shadows appeared beneath her twinkly
eyes and wrinkles sprayed cheeks that a second ago seemed cherubic.
"You never want to look into a light source," she said.
"Every time you glance up it's the Dracula effect, your eyes look like
black holes."
It's enough to make
one scream. One does.
Blame it on the wine.
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| The author digs a $10 Ikea spot |
It's amazing what lighting can do. Besides making you look more
attractive, and dare we say sexier, good lighting can be energizing, focusing,
relaxing, or simply illuminating -- accenting the room's best features,
minimizing the unsavory, and making your home a more enjoyable living and
entertaining space when evening falls.
With the plethora of lighting gadgets and gizmos available everywhere
from Ikea to Amazon to Home Depot and Restoration Hardware, just about any
effect is possible, inexpensively and often by dinnertime.
Capen, an award winning architect with Architrave
Architects, made her point about overheads. That harsh light, handy as it is
for Scrabble, killed the mood and threatened to put an end to a convivial over-dinner
conversation about....lighting.
"How do you know an architect designed a space? By the
number of wall switches." That's an architect joke, she said.
If Capen was designing a kitchen from scratch, for example,
she'd stop the cabinets eight inches from the ceiling, "and have a tube on
top so you have enough light to stagger through without tripping over the
cat." That would have one switch. Another would operate a brighter fixture
for the counter, "so you could see what you're doing with sharp
knives." Two more would operate an overhead light and a ceiling fan.
Instead of walking around the room and turning on lights, or
fidgeting with a dimmer, "I'd rather walk to the wall, flip some switches,
and be done with it," she said. "I can mix and match and get
distinctly different things versus one fixture that goes from light to less
bright."
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| Light at play in the Capen Weinstein home |
But most of us are not going to rip out the ceilings and
walls and install an elaborate and expensive new system. Instead, we sit with a
feeling of vague dissatisfaction, contemplating a room as clinically bright as
McDonald's, or fidgeting with a lamp shade to get enough light to read.
And Capen is quick to concede that you don't have to. There
are plenty of cheap sources of light that are plenty effective. "Like fluorescents," she said.
"Put them on top of cabinets where you don't see the fixture." This
is not just a kitchen trick, consider fluorescents on top of an armoire, or a
tall bookcase, anywhere the source is unseen.
Puck lights, little round battery powered LED discs that require no
wiring, are also handy for inside cabinets, under shelves, and dark corners.
"It's not about an expensive fixture, but what you can do with it to shape
a space."
