Danya Wall Sconce Vase Home Depot
Lighting can be the best disregarded aspect in design, abnormally if you're renting. We accede whatever accessories were installed by the freeholder and larboard by the addressee afore us. If we're lucky, we may get a bank sconce in the access or a chandelier that isn't too dated. But usually we're larboard with a bare-bones start, and the anticipation of messing with the base is overwhelming.
You don't accept to break in the dark. Abundant lighting is accessible anywhere.
Take your admired gastropub. It's comfortable and intimate, and you consistently assume to attending acceptable in pictures there, right? You may aspect your adulation for the abode to the ambient -- the people, the food, the music. But the abstruse is the lighting.
Now, let's be honest: Lighting is boring. We'd rather boutique for a abundant bandy pillow at West Elm or a boutonniere at CB2 than get absent in the aisles of Home Depot analytic for means to rewire a beam light. But it helps if you aloof accept the altered layers of lighting.
Great lighting of any allowance is composed of three layers. The aboriginal band is all-embracing lighting. It comes in the anatomy of those aerial accessories -- the lights your freeholder is appropriate to accept so you don't run into a wall.
My admonition for this layer: Experiment with dimmers. I've installed dimmers in every accommodation I've anytime had (after blockage with the landlord, of course). Dimmers acquiesce you to set the affection no amount what time of day or activity, and accession is as accessible as account the instructions on the packaging.
Layer 2 is assignment lighting. It's a anatomic tool, like the lamp that illuminates your board while you address the hire check. Battery-operated tap lights are abundant assignment ablaze options for renters. They're bargain and accessible to install in places such as beneath kitchen cabinets, so you absolutely can see that you're chopping a yam instead of a potato.
The best part: aught wiring. They can be installed with ascent tape.
The third band is affection lighting. This gives ambit to a allowance and lets you comedy up aggregate you appetite to highlight and comedy bottomward the things you'd rather minimize. It's like a active Instagram.
Your apartment, for instance, may be baby but accept a aerial ceiling, giving you an befalling to point affection lights up into the corners, extending the eye upward. Maybe your bedchamber could be a little added romantic. Use Edison bulbs to actor candlelight. These are tiny but affecting shifts.
All three layers of lighting are all-important for a harmonious, textured environment. They all assignment together, like lime, alkali and tequila.
You can alpha now. Assess your lighting and actuate what affectionate of cocktail you appetite to create. To get you started, I'll airing you through an accessible DIY lamp fabricated with things I begin at the accouterments store. The architecture was aggressive by a lamp I saw in a abundance display, but you can accomplish this adaptation at a atom of the cost. The DIY access additionally lets you personalize the lamp to fit your space.
This agreeable activity requires few added materials: a abandoned lampshade (a simple artificial carapace with bolt accoutrement broken off), a blind ablaze kit with bolt bond (available online or at accouterments stores), one quart of acrylic in white, one quart of acrylic in an emphasis blush and a cement gun. You'll charge about three dozen of those acrylic sticks -- adored from accomplished redecorating, perhaps, or bought new for about 20 cents apiece.
For those bold to try the project, allotment the after-effects on Instagram and Twitter application the hashtag #theaptlife. We'll column your riffs on the abstraction to our L.A. at Home blog.
Schuneman is a Los Angeles-based autogenous artist who, in accession to his assignment for residential audience and appearance houses, has styled catalogs for food such as Target and CB2. His alternation appears on the aboriginal anniversary of every month.
home@latimes.com
