Light
North-facing rooms are not a problem to be corrected
Trying to make a cool room feel warm with paint usually fails. Working with the light produces better rooms.
Light
Daylight, lamps, colour temperature and the single biggest thing people get wrong.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Light
Most room problems are lighting problems
A room that feels wrong and cannot be diagnosed is almost always lit from one place, at one colour, at one level.
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Light
Lumens, kelvin and CRI: the three numbers that decide a bulb
Watts stopped meaning brightness years ago. The figures on the box now describe three separate things, and mixing them up is why…
Light
Curtains and blinds are light control before they are decoration
Almost every complaint about a window treatment is a complaint about what it does to daylight, privacy or heat.
Light
Task light has to come from the right angle or it does nothing
Reading, chopping and working each need light from a different direction, and the fitting matters less than where it is.
Light
Glare is why a bright room can be uncomfortable
Adding more light to a room that already hurts to be in usually makes it worse. The problem is contrast, not quantity.
Light
A roof light delivers far more daylight than a window of the same size
The amount of sky a window can see, not its area, is what determines how much light gets into a room.
Light
The shade changes the room more than the lamp does
Two identical bulbs in two shades produce completely different rooms, because the shade decides where the light goes.
Light
Bathroom lighting is a mirror problem before it is a room problem
The downlight above the mirror is why you look worse at home than anywhere else, and it is entirely fixable.
Light
Evening light in a home is doing something to your sleep
The lighting choices that make a house feel calm at night are broadly the ones that interfere least with the body clock.
Light
How bright a room is depends on its surfaces, not just its lights
Two rooms with identical lighting can differ enormously in how bright they feel, because most of the light you see has bounced.
Light
Light outside the house changes how the inside feels
A dark window at night is a mirror. Put anything beyond it and the room stops ending at the glass.