How to Use Light Temperature to Boost Your Interior Design
Bring Out Your Home’s Best Features With Smart Control of Your Lights
Interior design generally includes wall color, furnishings, artwork and decorative features like flowers, figurines or frames. Often it’s easy to forget about the one thing that brings them all together: home lighting design. Now you can also enhance your ambiance and bring out stylistic features by adjusting the light temperature in your Woodlands, TX home. In this blog, we explain what color temperature is and how you can manipulate it to boost your interior design.
For an indepth guide to lighting and shading, download a resource designed specically for homeowners.
SEE MORE: Should You Go With a Wired or Wireless Lighting System?
What is Color Temperature?
Color temperature is the hue you get from a white light, which depends on its temperature. Warmer colors like red and orange have a low temperature while cool colors like blue and violet have high temperatures. Imagine you’re looking at a candle. The closer you are to the wick, the ‘lighter’ the flame looks—a blue or white tint. Once you move away from the wick, you get the ‘warmer’ orange colors.
How Can You Use Color Temperature in Your Interior Design?
You might be wondering what color temperature has to do with your interior design. A different color temperature may make walls look a different color. It's the magic behind that infamous blue-black/white gold dress. For this reason, it’s important that you settle on the light temperature for a specific room before choosing a paint for it. That same paint may look entirely different on a store sample than it does in your home. Changes in light temperature can also affect the particular feel of a room. Below are some common examples:
- Natural Lighting: Early in the morning you’ll get a ‘cooler’ temperature that promotes activity while sunset lighting offers a ‘warmer’ relaxing feel.
- Cool Lights: You can recreate that cycle with artificial lights. Cooler color temperatures are ideal for waking up (to encourage alertness), doing detail-oriented activities like cooking or crafts, or making your home look cleaner and more modern.
- Warm Lights: Warm Lights can give an earthier, romantic feel to your spaces. They're also ideal for winding down after a long day as they encourage sleep and relaxation.
How Can You Adjust Color Temperature?
In the past, to find the ideal settings you had to pick out bulbs corresponding to specific color temperatures. This made it difficult to adjust on the go depending on the time of day or activities. Now color tuning LED bulbs give you the ability to change the temperature from a mobile app or touchpad so you can have a versatile home lighting design.
Scheduled changes are also an excellent way to use these lights, especially when it comes to regulating your sleep. Have a “Wake Up” scene in your home lighting control system that turns on your lights to a cool color temperature to encourage alertness. You can then schedule a warmer light temperature to come on around 9 or 10 p.m. when it’s time to sleep.
Want to explore the use of color tuning in your home? SES Design Group can make it easy for you to adjust the temperature of your lights through a custom control solution. Contact us to set up a consultation.
