6 Simple Lighting Tips To Create A Cozy Atmosphere (On A Budget)

Lately I've been seeing lots of posts or like reels on Instagram where people are using lots of lamps instead of the standard down lights that come with your house or whatever these ceiling things are called. It generally creates a really nice cozy atmosphere in that room but you don't want to have to turn on every single light separately when you enter the room and secondly is there a way to methodically do this so that you don't accidentally miss spots in your room and you know it's actually a functional space. Well in this video I'm going to try and give you six tips on how I managed to light this space and hopefully you can take this recipe and apply it to your own. Separate it into task and ambient light. As the name suggests task lighting references the areas that you're going to be working in and ambient lighting is pretty self-explanatory. I like to map out where the work areas are going to be in the space and then fill in the gaps later. In this space we have two desks side by side and we have like a central work area which is where I tinker with my keyboards and all that kind of stuff and this actually leads us really nicely into the next one which is backlight any of your screens where possible. Screens are so bright man and they're like the complete antithesis to a cozy space because they're so blue. You want to help your eyes by balancing out the brightness of the screen where you can. Behind our monitors we have these two light bars and they're just pumped all the way to the max. Of course I'm like no eyeball specialist but I liken it to when you're trying to take a photo out of a window on a really sunny day. Hear me out this this makes sense trust me. You focus outside and then the inside of the house goes completely black and then if you try focus on the inside of the house the outside just gets completely blown out. To me that's what your eyes are always trying to do. So if you minimize that as much as possible then you're gonna have a nice pleasant viewing experience. Understand the difference between harsh and diffuse light. The smaller the source the harsher the light the larger the source the more diffuse the light. Because of this harsh lights are really good at focusing in on a spot to a certain extent. Diffuse lights are really good for filling in spaces like this. When we were picking the desk lamps we wanted to make sure that there was a good balance between not too harsh and not too diffuse because you want it to focus in on the area so that at night you're not distracted by the amount of shadows being cast everywhere. But you also don't want to be too diffuse because then there's no focus and you just end up having a big muddy area with no contrast and that's not fun. Keep everything the same temperature. Light temperature is measured on what's called a Kelvin scale. I don't know who Kelvin is but the confusing thing is though the larger the number the colder it gets. I don't know why but that's just how it is. It's probably stuff online somewhere. I just haven't looked into it that much. Warmer lights are generally seen as cozier obviously to a certain point. When it gets past a certain point it just turns red and that's just not what you want unless you're into that. I don't know. Cooler lights are much more like sterile like hospital-esque. Pick an area that you want to be sat in and stick to it. There's nothing worse than being in a room with like seven different color temperatures and it just looks crazy. Like you just don't want to be one of those. In this room I think everything is balanced to about 4500 Kelvin. This is definitely on the cozier side. Interior designers would probably scoff at this and be like you would only want to have that temperature in a bedroom or you want to have that in a living room because it can be harder to focus if you're like purely trying to work but I don't know. I just like it. I think it looks nice. Tip number five. Use smart bulbs. I don't know why these don't have as much coverage on YouTube but this whole space is done up with Ikea smart bulbs. They're like way cheaper than Philips hue bulbs. You basically connect this gateway thing to your internet modem and then you connect your light switches to the lights and then the switches kind of act as like a bridge between the gateway and the lights. So you can group them which is amazing. I've got two switches. One is task and one is ambient light and that eliminates the entire need to switch on every single lamp separately. I'll leave links in the description to the line of smart bulbs that I use if I can find it. Tip number six. Just take your time. I know this is not the most groundbreaking advice ever but honestly it's just a gigantic work in progress. When we first designed this space we only actually had the two desk lamps, the monitor back lighting and this lantern which is lighting my face right now. Over time we just ended up finding dark spots and we just kept adding and adding until the space was balanced. But after all of that can we take this and apply it to other spaces? Yes. We've got a kitchen and a living room scenario. This kitchen is much more high-end. This designed by my uni tutor actually. Ben if you're watching this you single-handedly made uni an amazing experience. Thank you so much. You can see it's not actually dark and the lights aren't fully in use but clear example of task lighting right here and ambient. Easy. On to the next one. Again super simple. They've got task lights over this sofa and a task light over this dining table. Very clear example of where the priority is and where you should put your lights if you want the space to be functional. And then they've just filled the rest of the space with ambience. You probably get the idea. You get what I'm trying to say at this point. But yeah that's pretty much it. If you want to know how I put this office together I'll link a video here. This video is very different to my usual. I usually do like keyboard content and this is very much not keyboard content. But for some reason had the urge to make this and I hope that it helps. And if it does let me know and I will probably make a few more because there are a few quirks about this space that I think I've figured out in terms of efficiencies and how to place things so you don't waste money. Anyway thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Cheers!