BATHROOM LIGHTING - PART ONE
Designing A Stylish, Yet Functional Lighting Plan For Your BATHROOM.
Your bathroom is a highly complex and important room in your home. It’s a room many of us want to feel relaxed in, however it also needs to be lit in a way that enables us to wake up and get ready for the day in comfort and ease. Bathrooms are complex from all design and construction perspectives and require a lot of thought to get right.
Unfortunately, light is often overlooked in the design process, beyond the selection of decorative lights that enhance the interior design. You’ll usually see a light of some sort (usually a pancake downlight) in the middle of the room (maybe 2), and maybe some light in the joinery with a couple of wall lights for the “look”.
The most common complaint we hear - from nearly every client we see - is “I can’t see my face properly in the bathroom mirror”.
Why is that?
It’s quite simple really – The truth is that 99% of home bathrooms are lit from the centre of the room - either from an old oyster light, or a couple of pancake downlights. By placing the light in the centre of the room, the floor tiles look great - but when you stand at the mirror, all that light is behind your head! So as soon as you look to the mirror for your reflection, your head creates a pool of shadow in the light. Even if you have light at the mirror, if it is not stronger than the light in the centre of the room, your contrast is still going to be off, and you won’t see yourself clearly in the mirror.
Head over to PART TWO of our Bathroom series to learn more about mirror lighting.
But in this blog, we’re looking at the rest of the bathroom and how we inject texture, and layers of light into this high traffic area of your home.
Recently we completed a series of renders, demonstrating the behaviour of different lighting effects in a single bathroom. Our renders are all about how the light performs and are created using actual performance data for light fittings.
We start with - a standard lighting plan for a bathroom…
Admittedly we’ve used a large bathroom for this example, but it makes it easier for you to see the lighting, and the principles work regardless of size.
You can see a standard array of 4 downlights in this bathroom - which looks OK in an image, but if you look closer, you can see how flat the room would feel. The floor tiles end up being the hero - and whilst we often choose beautiful floor tiles for our bathrooms, they are rarely the most important aspect of the room.
Functionality wise, this bathroom works right? - well that is until you want to see your face in the mirror - or use the loo in the middle of the night and have to turn on all those lights to navigate the room, waking you right up!
Perhaps you like to unwind and take a bath, but the glare of 4 downlights would definitely make it an unpleasant experience… yes, you can light a candle! but if your lighting is designed for your room, you can make the choice to use candles - rather than being forced to.
Using layered lighting design techniques has the greatest impact in your bathroom. By creating layers, you cover off all of the functions of a bathroom.
Brightness and function at the mirror. You need great light for putting on makeup in the mirror, shaving, hair styling – all of those important things
Add a little decorative highlighting feature elements [like your wall tiles, or a decorative wall light or two]
Finally, make sure you that you have a super low light level for late night visits
With all of those layers together, independently switched (or motion activated) this high functioning versatile room will meet your needs at all the different times of day that you use the bathroom.
Below we have a few different approaches to lighting this bathroom – they're not “right and wrong”, and you may not want every idea in the room, but there are a range of lighting design solutions on display, and you can choose the ones that work best for you.
Same BATHroom - with a light, bright, airy design…
With this design we’ve created texture, light and shade to bring visual interest to the space.
Starting at the mirror - you can see a slender bar light, pushing lovely powerful diffuse light down the face of the mirror, ensuring you can see everything without glare or shadow.
We have pushed light up the wall from the floor, to provide light for a relaxing bath…. with enough light to read a book and added an up-light so you’re well lit - but not “IN THE SPOTLIGHT”. Some folks prefer higher levels of light for the shower, this can be brought in with a linear LED strip light that will also highlight the feature tiles.
We have light hidden under the vanity, adding a perfect low level of light for a nighttime visit to the loo
Finally, the decorative elements……beautiful glass pendants - safely located outside the Bath Zones (PART THREE of our Bathroom Series) and adding a touch of drama, sparkle and texture around the room.
There is also a little light in the wall niche above the bath, which can be considered decorative and can provide another option for a functional nightlight.
The same bathroom, with a dramatic, moody lighting design…
This lighting design is a little more dramatic…
We’ve gone for serious mirror lighting - critical if you need a lot of light for shaving or makeup - and these lights can be arranged and adjusted to reflect perfectly out of the mirror - or directly to your face - to make sure you can really see what you’re doing! Then if those functional mirror lights aren’t in play, [turned off] we have a halo of light around the mirror and light under the vanity for soft illumination.
We’ve taken out the linear strip lighting, which was pushing down the wall near the shower adding a soft reflected layer of light to the room, and instead opted for up-lighting at both ends of the bathroom for general light. These fixtures effectively treat the whole room as a light fitting by bouncing light off the ceiling and creating brightness, plus a perception of size and space… useful light, with an uplifting sensation. That is the magic of reflected light. The light grazing down the far wall is ideal if you’ve selected textured tiles and want to make them come to life at night.
Then finally, we have left the light in the niche, which is great for a styled vignette - or as I mentioned before, equally useful for low level lighting when you’re enjoying a long soak. The night light under the vanity remains for the late-night quick visit.
Not every solution is appropriate to every bathroom…
The purpose of these renders is to allow you to see how changing the location of a light fitting, and using different types of fittings in a bathroom, can really impact on the overall design.
We’ve used light grazing walls - up and down, high functioning up-lights, diffuse linear LED strip in the ceiling, light under floating vanities, light in niches and pendants.
By incorporating these lighting effects in any number of combinations, we can craft a bright space, with comfortable light that doesn’t remind you of the surgical suite at your local hospital.
But not all these solutions are appropriate for every bathroom, and your bathroom may need a completely different lighting design approach. These examples merely allow you to see how the light transforms the look and feel of a bathroom and provides every layer of light for all activities.
Don’t leave your light to chance, take the time to consider how you want to feel and function in your bathroom at different times of the day. By putting as much thought into your lighting design as you do the tiles and tapware, you will end up with a bathroom that inspires - every day.
MINT lighting experts LOVE this kind of detail and have years of experience with choosing great light fittings. We are here to help – so if you’d like a professional to take care of your lighting design, get in touch!