1. Your decorative lighting should reflect your personality and compliment your overall intentions for your interior design scheme, whether it’s sophisticated, fun, funky, traditional, modern, cutting edge contemporary, or whatever style.
2. Decide whether you like to see the light source – the lamps (AKA “bulbs”) or not. If you don’t, look for fittings that either have something to hide the light source and diffuse the light whilst bearing in mind that this will reduce the amount of light that’s being created.
3. Consider whether you want your decorative lighting to provide multi-directional illumination, peripheral lighting, just up lighting, just down lighting or both up and down lighting. This might vary from room to room and whether it’ for lighting specific tasks or not.
4. Carefully chosen it can create variety and visual interest within a room and from room to room. Consider all types of decorative lighting, such as chandeliers, pendants, flush ceiling fittings, wall lights, table, desk and floor lamps.
5. Make sure that any decorative ceiling lights can be hung either at least 10-15cm higher than the tallest member of the family or are not in areas where anyone is going to walk under them, such as over a kitchen island or there could be regular trips to A&E!
6. Make sure that any decorative ceiling lights over dining tables or similar are not in anyone’s line of sight or diners will be talking to the lighting rather than each other!
7. Work out where you will be having tall items of furniture before considering whether wall lights will be the best form of decorative lighting in a room. If it seems that you’ll end up with very uneven illumination either look at an alternative form of decorative lighting completely or if you can supplement the arrangement with table and/or floor lamps.
8. Unless you are going for a very minimalist interior design scheme don’t get hung up about getting all of your decorative lighting per room from the same range or even in exactly the same finish – the careful combination of items that are slightly different but have something in common is the key to a successful interior design scheme.
9. If you are having more than 4 table or floor lamps in a room it can be annoying to switch all of them on or off each time that you want to use them so consider a lamp circuit.
10. Wherever possible make then dimmable so that you can get the perfect light level and atmosphere each time that you use them.