I like to believe that I am a forward thinker and not a person who looks behind longingly at The Good Old Days. Most of the time. When it comes to architecture, I love where the world is headed. We’re seeing modern homes with large expanses of glass, schools with huge amounts of daylight, factories […]
Category: Design Theory
Lighting can hurt you.
I believe light is a gift that can help us live better lives. A powerful combination of human history, personal experience, and deepening research backs me up: light can help us sleep better, wake up easier, heal faster, feel happier, suffer less pain, reduce the symptoms of aging…and the list goes on. My teenage sons […]
Lighting & Darkness
It is winter, between Christmas and New Year’s, and a perfect time to write about lighting and darkness. All around town, otherwise nondescript homes are festooned with thousands of tiny lights. Twinkle lights on downtown trees add glow to the sidewalks and storefronts, and in many living rooms are even more trees and more […]
Lighting…in Cars??
T Brand, the paid content arm of the New York Times, recently launched a post on cutting-edge lighting in cars. Paid for by Audi, the relatively short post has fabulous graphics and quotes from experts across the country on how light affects us. About half-way through the article there is a quote from an architectural […]
Lighting is Jewelry…or shoes?
Experts tell me I should consider lighting as “the jewelry of the home.” This has always bothered me instinctually, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I understood why. Jewelry is useless. Wait, wait, I am not advocating that we give up jewelry on our bodies and in our homes. I happen to […]
Sun Gods and Magic Sweaters
We used to have a better language for light, but lately we stick to words like LED, lumens, and color temperature. Necessary, perhaps, but not particularly inspiring. In history, we used words like Helios, Prometheus, Zeus, and Ra that belied our dependence on light. We organized our temples, our festivals, our stonehenges around light. We wrote […]
The Wrong Answer
Sometimes I get questions that seem simple but are complex to answer. A recent Houzz reader asked me “what spacing should I use for my recessed downlights?” Yep, this post is definitely on the practical side. Hmm. A lot of “designers” have rules of thumb for spacing downlights- perhaps you need one for every so […]
Light & Health: The Easy Way
If you or someone you know suffers from Social Jet Lag, Ambient Light may help. Talk to your doctor before using Ambient Light. Possible side effects include… I can hear the television commercial extolling the virtues of the latest miracle drug, Ambient Light. It energizes you in the morning! It is clinically proven to reduce the […]
Light Up the Ceiling
If you have a ceiling, you may want to consider lighting it. Especially if you can incorporate some variation to the ceiling, and one of the techniques discussed on my Houzz article. How to Light Your Ceiling Right […]
Less is … Less.
“Do we really need all those lights?” If you ask me to help lay out lighting for your living room (or kitchen, or bedroom, or bathroom…), the probability of me increasing the quantity of light fixtures is about a million to one. Increasing the quantity of lights does not mean there will be more light, […]