Make Your House Your Home - How London Interior Design Companies Work with Lighting Part II: Natural Lighting Effects

Natural light is responsible for everything we see in the world around us. At interior design companies, light informs the designers' perception of colour, it determines how we read, shape and texture, and it animates our surroundings with patterns of light and shadow. Yet despite its importance, light is often taken for granted - even by some of London's better-known interior design companies. An increasingly urban lifestyle does not lend itself to making the most of daylight and often many of our waking hours are spent indoors in semi-darkness. Interior design companies are out to change this, and in this second article of my two-part series on "How Interior Design Companies Work with Lighting" I will reveal the secrets of natural light and its influence on design, drawing from my experience in London working with some of the capital's most prestigious interior design companies.


By observing natural light, we can start to appreciate how light actually works. Interior design companies often talk of principles such as downlighting, where afternoon sunshine grazes a wall of illuminated foliage; backlighting, where a leaf is revealed in silhouette during a fresh London dawn; crosslighting, where the surface texture of brickwork or gnarled wood is emphasised; and spotlighting where a narrow shaft of light catches an object in its path, perhaps as a train turns a corner in a London Underground tunnel. Interior design companies rely on their experience in harnessing the ability of shadows to conceal. Some of the most adventurous clients demand special effects - I have seen interior design companies being asked to recreate the "drama of a rainbow as it paints a coloured arc across the sky." Definitely not a straightforward project! Nonetheless, each light effect has its own character and contributes to a harmonious balance.


I once saw top professionals from a famous London interior design company actually sitting down with graph paper to chart the passage of the sun during a twenty-four hour period for a prestigious residential project. The client was a feng shui practitioner, and he had asked the interior design company to guarantee a positive orientation for his living spaces. After plotting out the sun's pathway, the interior design company used CAD to project how the sun would appear during different seasons - taking into account how little daylight there can be during London winters. The result was breathtaking and a stunning example of how natural lighting can be used to "make a house a home."



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