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Beyond what kind of bulbs you buy, you can reduce your energy footprint, and boost your home's visual appeal, with some smart lighting placement choices. Using area lamps or spotlights instead of a glaring overhead light can bring your home maximum style with minimum wattage.
Compared to a single bright fixture, multiple low intensity light sources create a more attractive atmosphere by giving more three-dimensional definition to everything in your house. That means your stuff, you, and even your lucky visitors, will look better if you rely on small lights instead of one big one. So, all this is pretty, but how is it green?
Well, it's not inherently green to have a bunch of small lights, but it is if you place them right. The Shaw family's eco-smart residence, the Casbah Mountain Home in Colorado, has a low electricity footprint due in large part to its chic and sleek custom lighting design. By making sure that bulbs are exactly where they need to be and nowhere that they don't, the Shaw family gets just enough glow to make their home as gorgeous as it can be without having a big environmental impact. Part of green living is about making the most of what you have so that you don't need extra, and that philosophy definitely applies to lighting. Think about where you really need light, and put it there, instead of just putting it everywhere the way a big fixture does.
Instead of relying on ceiling lamps with bright bulbs that are constantly on, look into smaller lights that you can turn on and off depending on what part of your rooms need some shine. Keep low-wattage bulbs in your overhead fixtures to get some general fill lighting, then accentuate with some spotlights or area lamps that will give an extra boost in key areas, like over your sink, by your bed, or next to your phone. Keep switches and dimmers for these accent lights easily accessible, so that after the sun goes down, you can grab some glow when you need it, and go dark when you don't.
With a little ingenuity and some basic hardware, you can turn almost anything into a lamp, so adding some area lights to your house is a great chance to recycle some cool dumpster-diving artifacts into functional design elements. Another smart green option is to cruise secondhand shops, thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales for neat lamps, and then blend them into the rest of your home's look with a fresh coat of paint or a new sustainable lampshade.
This post was inspired by Episode 02 of World's Greenest Homes.
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