Welcoming Fall Evenings with Appealing Apartment Lighting

Good lighting plays an important part in your everyday life. The right amount of lighting creates a comfortable home environment, adding style while improving your ability to focus on everyday tasks and enhancing your overall mood and comfort. As long summer days begin to wane into beautiful fall evenings, now is an excellent time to focus on your apartment’s lighting and the role it plays in your home.

Use Lighting to Flatter Your Space

The key to great lighting is choosing options that provide the light you need while also contributing style to your space. Lighting needn’t be boring—lamps, lights, and shades are available in a wide variety of styles and sizes, allowing you to tailor your lighting needs to your space. A few larger, more powerful lights are best to illuminate bigger areas, such as a living room or master bedroom, rather than cluttering surfaces with multiple small lamps. Choosing lamps in a color or style that complements your existing décor can turn your lighting into a stylistic centerpiece that serves both an important function and draws the eye as a focal element in the room. String lights or lanterns can add a whimsical accent in a bathroom, bedroom, or kitchen, providing a small touch of light as well as texture and color that calls for attention without overwhelming your other décor.

Select the Right Brightness

Your lighting’s function is to provide illumination for your living spaces. Thus, it’s important to select lighting with the right brightness, even when keeping aesthetics in mind. Make sure ambient lighting is bright enough to provide a comfortable level of illumination throughout the room—a simple tip is to multiply the square footage of each room by 1.5 to determine the total amount of wattage you need for ambient lighting. To choose the best task lighting, multiply your room’s square footage by 2.5. The shades or covers your lighting uses will also affect the brightness of the bulb you should choose—you may want to choose a slightly brighter bulb for a lamp with an opaque cover, while those with lighter-colored shades or clear overhead lighting can use a lower wattage. Finally, consider choosing lower wattage bulbs in your bedroom, particularly for the lamps beside your bed. Studies have shown that gradually moving into areas with lower light levels as you near bedtime can help you fall asleep faster to regulate your sleep schedule for a better night’s sleep.

Consider Your Bulb Options

There are a variety of light bulb options available to light your apartment. Various products emit light in different parts of the spectrum, which can affect the way your apartment and your décor look. Incandescent and halogen bulbs are the cheapest lights available, but have a shorter lifespan and generate heat as well as light. CFLs are much longer-lasting—these lights are best in lamps you plan to leave on for long periods of time, such as ambient lighting in your living spaces. If you want to opt for the lighting option with the longest lifetime and least energy usage, LED lights are available for use in existing light fixtures. Although LEDs are more expensive, they are rated to outlast traditional bulbs by 25-50 times, and they’ll outlast CFLs by 8-10 times.

At Alta Farmers Market, our new apartments in Dallas, TX, feature spacious floor plans just waiting for your personalized touch. You can find out more about our community on the web, including our list of luxury apartment and community amenities.