Beautiful Light

An Insider's Guide to LED Lighting in Homes and Gardens

Randall Whitehead, Clifton Lemon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Interior Design

Beautiful Light by internationally acclaimed lighting designer Randall Whitehead and lighting industry expert and educator Clifton Stanley Lemon is a combination of idea book, design resource, and product guide. It explores the transition in residential lighting from incandescent light sources to LEDs, and how to apply LED lighting with great success.

It begins with the fundamental characteristics of light, including color temperature, color rendering, and spectral power distribution, and how LEDs differ from older light sources. Combining innovative graphics with the enduring design principles of good lighting, the book explains how to design with light layers, light people, and balance daylight and electric light. Every room of the house, as well as exterior and garden spaces, is addressed in 33 case studies of residential lighting with LEDs, with a wide variety of lighting projects in different styles.

Showcasing over 200 color photographs of dramatic interiors beautifully lit with LEDs, and clear, concise descriptions of design strategies and product specifications, Beautiful Light helps both professionals and non-professionals successfully navigate the new era of LEDs in residential lighting.

Part I
The Story of Beautiful Light

Overview

This section is the story of how we’ve come to integrate the relatively new technology of solid state lighting (LEDs) into our traditional design practice of architecture, interior, and lighting design. While the transition from incandescents and fluorescents to LEDs has not been without bumps in the road, we show how it’s possible to strike a beautiful balance between natural daylight and electric light in residential design today, and that LEDs are perfectly suited to the task – in many, if not most, ways they’re superior to the older lighting technologies.

It’s true that technology never seems to want to stop evolving, and we will certainly see more improvements to LEDs. But for now we’re no longer in the adoption phase of the technology where we’re waiting for high quality products to become affordable or practical. Many of the advances in the near future are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary, and this is not a bad thing. Designers as craftspeople need time to get used to their tools stabilizing so that they can develop best practices.

A key idea in our understanding and practice of residential lighting design, and one that we repeat many times in this book, is the focus on lighting people and skin. The location in the home where this is most critical is in the bathroom, at the vanity. Architects and interior designers don’t have much control over their clients, the human beings who inhabit the spaces they design, so they care mostly about the things they do control – the materials, finishes, furniture, and colors in the environment. Subsequently lighting designers, who are largely following the lead of architects and interior designers, often forget about lighting people. Truly human-centric design is a holistic process of making people look better throughout the day and into the evening, not only at the vanity, but in all rooms of the house, in the context of fabrics, furniture, food, finishes, and materials.

In this section we review the basic properties of light and the techniques and tools in the lighting designer’s palette: light layering; types of lamps and luminaires; controls. We also talk about how to do this sustainably and as part of an integrated and collaborative design team.

Finally, we’ve learned that studying lighting fails is one of the best ways to learn to “see” and create good residential lighting, and we provide many very typical examples of lighting as an afterthought to what is often very good residential design. Once you’ve learned to identify the common mistakes, you’ll be in a much better position to transform your clients’ (and your own) spaces with beautiful light.

Figure SBLO.1 Photo and Lighting Design: Randall Whitehead.

Chapter 1
Evolution of Interior Lighting

In order to explore the evolution of lighting in the home we start with a brief examination of our modern Western concept of the home, the archetypal structures that embody it, and how they evolved. Even though the ideas of family and, indeed, “home” are fluid social and cultural constructs and are constantly shaped by the combined forces of technology, economics, and urbanization, for the purpose of focusing our discussion to perhaps the most commonly understood model in the United States today, we’ll talk about the single-family home. Whether single-or multi-story with detached walls on a separate plot of land or as part of a larger multi-family building, this layout is typically comprised of a collection of single purpose rooms – living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, multipurpose open plan rooms, miscellaneous utility roms, and outdoor spaces. This particular arrangement has not been the norm for the majority of human history.

The most primeval dwellings made use of shelter to mitigate, and harness, the effects of the environment. Our basic physiological needs demand a roof over our heads and walls to create an envelope for protection from the elements, predators, and enemies and a place for fire, gathering, and preparing and consuming food. A completely dark enclosure is not useful. One of the earliest innovations was an opening in the top of a hut, tipi, or other enclosure that not only let in daylight but allowed for the exhaust of smoke and fumes from the cooking fire and oil lamps which were necessary to dispel the darkness.

Before advanced lighting technology (candles, gas lamps, then electric lights) humans evolved under conditions of light that centered around the daily rhythms of sunlight during the day and firelight at night. It’s easy to imagine that our visual equipment–our eyes and brain – are hardwired for these two conditions and the transitions between them. Indeed, vision science has identified parts of the eye – rods and cones – that process light at different levels. There are three kinds of vision: scotopic vision, or night vision, which uses only rods to see (objects are visible, but appear in black and white); photopic vision, or daytime vision, which uses cones and provides color; and mesopic vision, the in-between vision, which we use most of the time in mid-level light conditions.

As tribal groups grew in size and complexity, communal dwellings evolved that were organized around a central fire. People all slept in the same large lodge or room, along with the dogs. Light was provided by oil lamps, fire, and openings which were often no more than holes in walls or ceilings that let in light and air and allowed smoke to escape.

Figure 1.1 Four stages of complexity in the evolution of interior lighting: 1. Sky light and firelight in a primitive hut. 2. Sky light and firelight in a log cabin with small windows. 3. Single source ceiling lighting in a modern home. 4. Balanced layers of light: ambient, task, accent, and decorative. Illustration: Clifton Stanley Lemon.

Our current arrangement of single purpose rooms seems to have begun in 12th century Northern Europe with the innovation of the chimney. This was the era of a mini Ice Age, and temperatures were much colder than what we’re experiencing today. Chimneys allowed multi-story buildings to share distributed heat from one shaft. This hastened the development of smaller rooms which were more economical to heat, which contributed to the modern idea of domestic privacy – a “room of one’s own,” so to speak. Windows in these buildings were expensive and were sometimes glazed with thin sheets of animal horn, a material also used for lanterns.

The ancient Romans had developed advanced glass manufacturing methods that made glass windowpanes affordable for many buildings by 200 CE, but this technology was lost during the Dark Ages between 400 and 800 CE. In the 14th century however, French glassmakers perfected the technology of making flat panes of transparent glass, which were initially small and required assembly in lattices or window frames. Gradually window openings became larger and allowed buildings to make more use of daylight. Before gas and then electric light, an architectural tradition had developed that made skillful use of buildings’ volume, surfaces, and windows to modulate daylight for lighting the home. In fact, an archaic architectural term for windows is “lights.”

At night though, interior lighting for most homes consisted of fires, candles, and eventually more sophisticated lamps using oil and kerosene. The next lighting technology revolution was gas lamps, which produced a much brighter light and began to dispel darkness at sufficient levels to extend working hours and, along with many other rapidly evolving technologies, impact forms of social organization and family structure. Ingenious devices were invented that multiplied the fragile, precious light as much as possible – chandeliers for instance were devised to amplify candlelight and were a great status symbol as only rich people could afford candles in medieval times. The forms of these luminaires persisted long after fossil fuel-based lighting gave way to electric lighting. Also, all fuel-...