Decorative Lighting trends come and go and I’m noticing the wonderful thing about trends is that we are all slowly finding our own unique voices amongst them and making choices that reflect who we are and how we want to live – regardless of “fashion”.

Personally, I think that is the greatest trend for the future - decorative lighting that is quality made, creatively designed and will bring you joy for years to come. I love seeing the decorative choices people make to stamp their personality and signature on a room.

As architectural lighting designers, our focus is not on what your decorative lights look like – that's part of your interior design. We know where we want them to be in your home, but ultimately, we focus on trends in technology and lighting design solutions to make the whole home work.

With any choice for your home, it’s important to remember you're possibly going to live with your choices for the next 20 years or until you sell up or renovate – so it’s worth taking the time to make sure your choice is right for you.

With that in mind….

My first tip is to get involved.

Don’t leave your lighting selections to the last minute so your only choice is cheap downlights and even cheaper pendants.

The next step is to review current trends and advances in lighting TECHNOLOGY and figure out if they add value to your life and your home,

technology Trend 1 - the quality of your light in your HOME

The massive influx of LED lighting over the past few years has resulted in some very disappointed people who were trying to do the right thing for sustainability by using low wattage light, but who have been let down by the poor quality of light produced by many LED fittings.

Luckily the recent trend from high quality manufacturers of LED light is to focus on QUALITY of light and not just energy saving. This means that designers like us (and home owners like you) have access to some truly beautiful light - we just have to know where to find it. Working out if a light is good quality requires a little knowledge about measurements of light.

Light Quality comes down to four main things:

Colour Rendering (the ability of a light source to represent colours faithfully)
Consistency of White (that's the colour temperature - how warm or cool the light looks, and then how consistent that colour is across different lights)
Glare control (creating light without glare has always been a key focus for luminaire designers)
Efficiency - how much energy is used to create the light - and how much of the light created actually leaves the fitting and enters the room.
Colour Temperature consistency. With LED technology, colour temperature of your light is created by the balance of phosphors over the LED chip in the light fitting. The upshot of this is that there are wide variations in colour temperature possible. Generally speaking, cheap fittings use cheap chips and cheap phosphors so the colour temperature won’t be consistent and may not actually last the lifetime of the light fitting. Quality is measured by SDCM (Standard Deviation of Colour Measurement) - and all quality manufacturers provide that data on their fittings. You need an SDCM of less than 3 (<3) as an absolute minimum. Good light fittings currently are generally <2 and excellent ones are <1 – making their light completely visually consistent

All quality manufacturers now provide this useful technical information with their fittings, explaining their performance within these parameters and more. With the right data at our fingertips, we can all look forward to a clearer, brighter future. You can read more in our blog Evaluating light fittings at home.

technology Trend 2 - Hiding or concealing Light in anything and everything

LED light comes in so many shapes and sizes these days, that it can be hidden in just about anything - and it's showing up everywhere!

There are very few items left which cannot be purchased with a light in them.

Some applications are just plain crazy- but many, especially lighting within cabinetry, which is activated by the opening and closing of doors and drawers (much like your fridge), is an exciting opportunity in home lighting.

The opportunities here are endless, and as the technology advances, they become more and more efficient, using less power and materials to create great results.

design Trend 3 - No penetrations in your ceiling

No more recessed lighting, means fewer holes in your ceiling, less loss of air and heat and overall a more sustainable home. With greater focus being placed on the thermal performance of the building envelope (sometimes known as "Passive Home Design"), moving away from recessed lighting is the next obvious step. You can read more in our blog about lighting Passive Homes.

The fewer holes you make in your ceiling and insulation - (because insulation over a downlight, is just a bad idea - it won't cause fires, but it will reduce the life of the light) -the better your home will perform at the height of Summer and the depths of Winter, saving you more money than you can imagine.

It is possible to get downlights that are “IC_4” rated, so you can cover them with insulation, so if you’re completely stuck or really, really want to have downlights in your ceiling, you can, and you can cover them over with your insulation. But if you have an opportunity to be more interesting with your light, then why wouldn’t you?

When we avoid downlights, we usually end up with fewer light fittings going into a room - the savings just keep rolling on with this trend, no wonder it's more and more popular!

design Trend 4 - Layering your LIGHT to create different moods

As more people realise the value of light in their homes, lighting designs that allow you to create different moods at the flick of a switch become more popular. We appreciate now that blasting our brains with downlights at the end of every day is not the ideal pathway to a relaxing evening and a good night’s sleep.

The flexibility of a lighting design using a variety of light fittings and lighting techniques results in rooms that can have bright light (for those times when you want to see every detail with task focused light - putting it only where you need it) and subtle mood lighting (for relaxing at the end of the day), all in the one space, and all at the touch of a button. If you want to go a step further, you can fully automate with clever lighting controls pre-setting your light levels for every moment of the day

technology Trend 5 - home automation

The world of lighting control has leapt forward - flexibility and ease of access to available products is astonishing. The best way to evaluate what you need is to question the value it brings - is it something cool that you'll likely never use? or does it make your life easier? Your answer to that question should guide your choices around home automation.

Light at home has never been more exciting, or more varied and confusing!! It no longer costs an arm and a leg to bring great design with cutting edge technology into your home, but it does take some research to determine the right approach to your lighting design.