Desperately seeking inspiration (Lighting)

[Richie]

Hi guys/girls

I hope this is in the right forum so here goes.....
The wife and I are weeks away from completing the purchase of our new house and were having constant rows over lighting

I've looked all over the web for ideas and ispiration but just keep getting these lighting websites that all have tons of lighting, but nothing to really show the effects in a room of the lighting.

Bedroom:
I want to have ceiling spots in the bedroom with uplighters on the walls and the wife hits me with "I dont want it looking like a bloody office!"

In my office I want to put directional spots in the ceiling so I can adjust the direction of light if need be but not sure how many to install in a room with 11msq floor space (2.6m x 4.34m)

I was thinking either 3 in a row in the middle of the ceiling or 4 spread out in a rectangle but have no idea how this will look until its too late!

Any help in finding examples /pictures of how these things look would really be appreciated as I dont want to make holes in the new ceilings only to later think "hmmm, should have done it the other way"

Huge thanks
Richie

[Slugster]

How can we not call you Cookie from now on...

We spent days figuring out the placement for the kitchen down lighters so I might be able to offer some non-professional help.

If you want flush mounted down lighters first things first go onto a manufacturers website like Osram and look at the diagrams for beam spread over distance. This will give you and idea of how big the patch of light will be.

Then throw them away as they are useless, go and buy one down lighter, mount it in a bit of wood and wire it up. You can move it about to get an idea of how it performs.

In the kitchen we were surprised how far forward you need to place them so your are not working in your own shadow. The temptation is to place them over head or centrally over the work surface (or in your case desk).

This will cast a bad shadow.

We put them 150mm from the wall over a 600mm work surface. Sounds stupid but works perfectly.

As for horizontal spacing over the work top, we've got 800mm between them. And this means the work surface (which is 900mm high) has no dark areas at all.

For the rest of the kitchen where you won't be doing any real stuff we've put them about 1.6m apart.

But all the above is for a GU10 bulb. Different models of bulb have different shapes of beam. And they are all 50w. Bear in mind the current load builds up quite quick.

As for the upstairs rooms - this is what I thought but I'm really keen to hear what the pro sparks think.

We didn't fit down lighters for four reasons.

1) They are too directional and unless you had loads of them, the lighting would be patchy. OK in a kitchen / office but not relaxing in a bedroom.

2) The wife thought it would look like an office - Snap

3) They get sodding hot and I wasn't sure what would happen if the loft insulation fell over them - something would probably catch fire. I know you can get cages for the bulbs to keep the rockwool away, but then you have a cold patch.

4) They let a draught in and creepies fall through the gaps. Not good for the wife if they are over the bed at the time. As my wife has already pointed out, one cockroach in the bed is quite enough.

So none of the upstairs rooms will get flush mounted down lighters.

For the bedroom we are going for a central multi bulb fitting (haven't chosen it yet but we've only been looking for 2 years - no sense in rushing it) and lamps on tables.

Cheers

[Richie]

Hi Slugster

Thanks for the feedback, I think if us guys were left t our own devices, all homes across Britain would be spotlight heaven

I'd fill the whole house with them if I thought I would get away with it.

I might just go with the wall uplighters with maybe a nice central light fitting with bulb covers

The one thing I really cant stand with lighting is any light fitting that has the bulb visable so any central light fitting would need to have the bulbs hidden/covered as I find having the filament of any bulb visible to be an eye sore!!

Oh well, back to the world of googling for lighting...

Cheers
Richie