By their own lights: lighting designers and their homes

Two different lighting designers with discernibly individual styles. When it comes to their own homes have they practised what they preach and created a lit environment that reflects their own professional approach? Or, like the cobblers’ children that had no shoes, did that all go out of the window? Jill Entwistle goes through the keyhole to find out

Even at the entrance to this 1890s house it is apparent that the resident lighting designer has a penchant for classic old light fittings and rummaging in junk shops to find them.

A late Victorian coloured-glass pendant casts subtle patterns on the wall. On the end wall is a nifty bit of downlighting onto an ornate mirror from a recessed adjustable fitting. “That is one of the few bits of proper architectural lighting design in the whole house,” he admits. “The lighting here kind of grew.”

The c1910 desk light in the living room, with a 25W dimmable tungsten lamp, is another junk shop find. While the emphasis seems to be on the visual appearance of the lamp, it is another example of the attractive lighting effects that old luminaires can produce.

The amber glass set into the metal diffuser creates an orange glow on the wall, “…which is what I love about that light,” he says. It also reflects his interest in not only restoring old fittings but also tinkering with them to improve the light. “Originally it didn’t have the dangly bits, which are absolutely typical of that period, so I took it to a restorer. The lampholder is also really low, and glary as a result, so I used a convertor that changes a bayonet to an ES lamp, which raised it up.”

“A period house does force a certain atmosphere on the whole thing. If I were starting from scratch I might just go all modern.”

He also created what he calls the Firelight, a collection of old incandescent lamps, some dating from the 1930s. He says: “I thought it was fun. Incandescent lamps give out more heat energy than light energy, so I thought: why not use that and make a virtue of it? They’re on a quite complex dimming system, so they’re always very underrun, apart from the kitsch flicker lamps, which animate the whole thing.”

In fact, home-grown lighting is another theme, with two pendant ceiling fittings created by his wife, artist Julie O’Reilly. The fitting above the kitchen table features stylised cutlery cut out from sheet aluminium and attached by hooks, while the pendant above the dining table comprises eye shapes made out of translucent, heavy-duty tracing paper. Both have dimmable incandescent lamps. (He acknowledges that the only CFL is in the hall pendant, where the coloured glass is ideal for countering the worst effects of the colour rendering).

Low-voltage downlights

There are low-voltage downlights around the place, installed when the house was done up more than a decade ago, but he concedes that it doesn’t add up to a unified lighting design. He says: “There is some downlighting in the living room, for instance, but there’s nothing big and celebratory for them to light, so it doesn’t actually work as a lighting scheme. I installed them at a time when we hadn’t got a clue how we were going to use the room. Then, when the bits and pieces arrived, nothing ever quite lined up. We have to have them incredibly dimmed to give a bit of background light. The main lighting is provided by the series of table lamps in a traditional way.”

A period house, combined with lots of inherited bits and pieces, he says, “does force a certain atmosphere on the whole thing”. If he were starting from scratch, he “might just go all modern”, he says, and professionally enjoys using cutting edge technology in both modern and heritage schemes.

Contemporary, colourful and a bit quirky are the characteristics of our second lighting designer’s house. “Some of the lighting in my house is quite idiosyncratic, particularly the decorative stuff,” he says.

Unlike our first lighting designer, a new extension at the back of the house has presented an opportunity to introduce a more radical approach, namely a colour-change system in the kitchen area, which sits at one end of the living space. While colour has featured in a number of his schemes, he knows it is not everyone’s cup of tea. “While I’m happy to suggest colour changing to people, I don’t think I’d ever impose what I wanted on them. I’m very much guided by what they say and people’s tastes are completely different.”

This is someone out to impress with his lighting and to use his home as an exemplar to other people. That starts in the newly created hallway, with floor-recessed 2W amber LEDs that uplight one of the walls. “I’m trying to get people to use amber, because it’s like candlelight, much nicer than warm white. It’s quite a statement. We wanted to make a dramatic entrance.” It’s not all about being flash though. He says: “Some of it is impressive, like the colour-changing stuff, to amaze friends, but some of it is fairly simple, like having the low-voltage downlights where we need them - onto the dining table, rather than into the middle of the spaces. I put light where it’s needed rather than flooding everything. You get a lot more drama that way.”

“The colour-change is nice to have when you’ve turned everything else down and it’s all quite dark so you get a bold impact at the other end of the livingroom. It defines it without impacting on you. It forms a backdrop.”

Clients, worried about dark bits, often need a lot of convincing, he says. This is also someone who clearly likes his gizmos, including a Rako wi-fi control system. “One of the advantages of the Rako system is that if you want to add something you just buy a new module and connect it up. You can extend it as much as you like.” However, he has also learned something from the installation, namely that all the structural steelwork that’s holding up the back of the house is not conducive to the smooth functioning of a wireless system. “That’s not their fault; it’s my fault for not realising lots of structural steel would get in the way of the radio signal,” he admits. “So now I would probably make sure I had enough keypads to make sure you can turn it all on and off from there.”

Other lighting elements are more whimsical. There’s definitely a bit of an animal vibe - a pendant with bird, and a rabbit table lamp in the living room. Two downlights at either side of the pendant are fitted with Rosco gobo accessories to create leaf dappling on the floor.

In the bedroom there’s an internally illuminated (fluorescent) shop mannequin. “We wanted a sort of boudoir feel in the bedroom, so it’s dark with heavy fabrics and black furniture. We wanted some kind of standard lamp and it just occurred to me to get that. The basque on top was my wife’s idea.”

There’s more evidence of the gizmo thing in the Mathmos Airswitch lamps that are used as bedside lights. On the whole, the professional and the personal have combined to good effect but this is highly individual rather than a bland textbook solution. “It cost about £2,500 for the lighting, with about half spent on LEDs and the control system. It wasn’t a huge amount given the overall budget for the new extension, but it just makes the lighting sgnificantly better than everybody else’s lighting. It can do things no one else’s can.”

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