One rainy winter night some months ago, determined to start to figure out our list of light fixtures, Melody and I moved through our half-finished house in the dark. Because the house was framed up but the roofing not yet fully sealed up, we heard the sounds of splatters and dribbles happening throughout the darkened house. We sidestepped puddles on the plywood floors to shine our cell phone light upwards at sections of wall framing and talked of sconces and recessed lighting that might someday go there.
But that was then. This is now. These days we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. (That’s a figure of speech, though our house actually does have a light fixture in an arched passageway that resembles a short tunnel.) We had set pretty high standards for ourselves. I like my lighting schemes to have layers to them. By that, I mean I like having options for some background lighting controlled separately from the brighter central fixtures. It’s not expensive to do, you just need to consider it and design it in. There would also be the requisite recessed can lights here and there in all the efficient places. All on dimmers, of course. This mood lighting adds subtlety and richness. I wanted one switch that would turn on several secondary light fixtures that would do things like “wash” a wall behind a potted tree (creating a delightful silhouette, I hoped) or a small spot light here and there that would highlight art. By having these on one switch, it would be easy to enjoy this lighting effect on a nightly basis without having to run around and turn on many separate switches.
I was influenced about the idea of layered lighting when I read a book in the nineties called “The Seven Layers of Design” by Christopher Lowell. But I was probably even more influenced in the sixties by the living room at my best friend’s house. During sleepovers at my friend’s, the ten year old me would sometimes make a pilgrimage to that lush room so that I could take in dimly lit oil paintings, one of them with the face of an old man with a perplexing Rembrandt sadness to it. I remember a happy little backlit metal sculpture of a city skyline. There was something peaceful about that room. After a minute or two, my buddy and I would run back to the other room to watch “Man From Uncle” or “Wild Wild West.” (We would also sometimes visit his older brother’s room to take in his big array of black light posters glowing in the dark with such psychedelic awesomeness. I’m not sure which room I preferred.)
There is always a learning curve to things. This is true of life and especially true of unique chores like building a house. Even if you know things already, there are always new levels of knowledge required. Of all the areas to be supported with decisions for this house such as tile, paint colors, appliances, flooring, it was lighting that required the most far ranging thinking and exploring.
First there is the chore of laying out the lighting scheme on paper. Not my first rodeo, given my day job. After construction starts, the house gets framed up and wires get run to all those locations shown on the plans. Eventually actual fixtures must be found for these locations and the real work of lighting design begins.
Exploring the range of possibilities is the first step. Trips to Lamps Plus and Home Depot are an easy way to start to see possibilities, but then one moves on to richer pastures such as Rejuvenation Lighting in Berkeley or online sites like 1800lighting.com. We found Hobrecht’s in Sacramento to be a worthwhile trip. When I methodically explore the range of possibilities like this, it’s easier for me to feel like I’m not going to miss out on something cool. I got good at digging into the “product description” details to see if the LED version of the lamp came as a warm tone LED (2700 Kelvin) or was it only available in the dreaded cooler tones (3500 Kelvin) which produces light that is way too blue and cold for me. When shopping online, I learned to get good at evaluating the size of these fixtures by reading the size and then holding my hands out to approximate the size of it, and I mean really try to correctly visualize the size of it, as if I was pulling it out of the box and about to commit to it going up on the wall of my house. Haven’t we all got that sort of thing wrong, ordering things online and not predicting the size correctly?
I found that I selected lighting as much for the glow it created as for the interesting shape of the fixture itself. These days there are plenty of fixtures that are just too shiny and jangly for me. I need more than just an interesting metal shape with a bulb that is mostly exposed. Even with the now trendy “Edison bulbs,” this was way too raw a look for me. Perhaps my friend’s mom’s living room shaped me this way.
Just yesterday, as I was getting ready to find an ending for this column, Melody and I made a special nighttime visit to the house in order to throw on a few electric breakers temporarily that would power up the house. That would allow us to walk around throwing light switches and see the effect of some of our lights for the very first time.
Oh my. After so much visualizing, here it was. On the tall walls of the atrium the two spots washed the wall like I wanted, but were too bright and would need lower watt bulbs for a softer effect. But most of the rest were good. The best was the star shaped lamp (with all the little holes throughout its sheet metal surface) that cast an array of speckled highlights onto an arched ceiling. Very appealing.
So we saw what we had made and we saw that it was good. So we rested . . . . for about a half a day and then we were back to looking for the last few fixtures we still hadn’t figured out yet. Those light fixtures aren’t going to select themselves, you know.

Steve McKee is a Benicia architect. He can be reached on the web at: www.smckee.com or at (707) 746-6788.
All rights reserved.

(Courtesy photo)

Sharing is caring!