Light it up

How much would you guess that you've spent on furniture, artwork, carpets, paint, and all other decorative features in you house?

It's probably a larger number than you'd care to mention out loud. And if you compared that figure to the amount of money that you've spent on lighting fixtures you'll end up with a ratio that's closer to the odds of a winning Lotto ticket.

Proper lighting design is something that is always overlooked in both new construction and remodeling projects. Most people don't know anything about lighting design and fixtures so they don't know what to ask for. Everyone settles for recessed incandescent lighting fixtures. You can walk into any home built within the last 15 years and nearly every single one of them will be using recessed cans in every room. I've been working at Metex for about five years now and I've been into a lot of homes for custom installation projects, and I have never been into a home that has a lighting layout that does what it should.

Proper residential lighting should focus on several things, not just providing an adequate light level. Metex uses a lighting design method known as the A.D.A.P.T.I.V.E method and it accounts for:

• Architecture

• Decorative

• Art

• Pathway

• Task

• Interior Decoration

• View

• Exterior

Now, in the course of the design these steps tend to overlap, but you can see how much should be considered when discussing lighting.

The lighting system in your home should work with the architecture, not distract from it; decorative ceilings, coves, niches, exterior building facades can all be made more attractive with the proper lighting. In some cases, the lighting fixtures should be used as decorative elements. Chandeliers in the dining room are a common example. Wall sconces and surface mounted ceiling fixtures complement the architecture through proper placement and selection. Wall art should be properly accented. Hunting trophies look especially captivating when properly illuminated. All these design elements add contrast and excitement to your home. The traditional recessed cans just bathe the room in a soft yellow light which distorts colors and makes the room seem dull and boring.

Another important element to lighting design is the control of the fixtures themselves. Easily controlling the intensity of the lights is important when creating ambience in a room. Lighting control systems come with keypads that arrange the lights so a room looks as elegant or as cozy or as whatever you like as easy as possible. Typically we use “smart dimmers” in the more frequently used rooms, such as the family or living rooms. These smart dimmers can store preset “scenes” so that you can dial in the right lighting scene for the occasion. In a living room, for example, we often create scenes such as “Entertainment.” Pushing this button will adjust the intensity of the various lights in the room to certain specifications. The other benefit of a lighting control system is that it can eliminate all the wall clutter that builds up when you have to have a bank of five or more separate light switches. You can replace all that junk with a single keypad (the same size as a regular light switch) and have the same control that five dimmers would give you.

We can also control the natural light that enters you home. Sunlight is great most of the time but it also has its downsides. Too much natural light entering your home will increase you utility bills, the UV rays can damage furniture and artwork, and it can cause a glare so bad as to render your new HDTV virtually useless during daylight hours.

Our Lutron Shading Systems come in a wide variety of styles and designs and we can design a system that meets your goals. For example, you can eliminate harmful UV rays from entering your home by using sheer shades with high UV absorption rates yet still keep your view. If you have a TV/media room you can use blackout shades to completely shut out all the sunlight.

The idea is that your home is going to be one of the largest investments in your lifetime. And if you're like most people, you enjoy adding things to your home to make it more inviting, more beautiful, more you, but you won't be getting the most out of all the great stuff you buy if you don't accent it properly with a good lighting design.

If you'd like more information or would like to see some of these products in use, stop by and see us at 4610 San Bernardo or call us at 725-1235. You can also visit our website at www.metexav.com and see some photos on our online photo gallery.