I recently entered a quiet, DIY shop in South London and caught the tail end of a conversation: '…as soon as I get them in they're gone, I stock boxes and boxes of them and straight away they sell out. Its as if there is a siege. The trouble is finding the stock...' It was early in the morning and it took me a while to realize what they were talking about - light bulbs.

 

Clearly, it is total insanity that in modern Britain it is easier to buy cocaine than incandescent bulbs. Legislation has foisted compact florescent bulbs on us, which give a cold clinical light; they cannot be dimmed, it’s a myth that they last longer than incandescent bulbs and they require significantly more ‘embedded energy’ and resources to produce. It’s ironic that the very thing that symbolizes a good idea has provoked such prohibitive law, but enough of political rants. I have made all the lights in my houses. Some I’m happy with, others were more learning exercises, but making your own lights is very cheap, very satisfying, and more importantly, it allows you to specifically tailor the light to what each space requires. The alternative is screwing something to the wall that was designed in Italy, made in China and transported to John Lewis.

 

Bespoke lighting by its very nature is specific to its particular location, and you will have your own idea as to what is required, so rather than dictate a design ‘answer’ here are all the tricks I know in ten points:

 

The minor issue is what do the lights themselves look like; the major issue is how they make everything else look. Ideally everything is beautiful, however if there must be a compromise then obviously it’s most important that the room is beautifully lit - interior design magazines are stacked with pictures of funky lights in badly lit spaces.

 

Think of the film noir movie genre, with its striking silhouettes, strong contrast, blinding headlights, and long pronounced shadows, Classic film noir lighting was achieved using a single light source often low down to create drama and tension. It looked great in those movies, but for your home, it’s a recipe for streaming eyes and headaches. So however much you love Humphrey Bogart or Orson Wells take film noir as an anti role model. Generally, for a domestic space you should aim for a soft diffuse light that falls where you want it without glaring into your eyes.

 

At this point I’m afraid I need to cover the science bit, but ill keep it simple, basically glare is different to brightness: glare is when there is excessive contrast, but brightness is simply the amount of lux. This is why you can read in sunlight or under the covers with a torch, even though the sun is a million times brighter than the torch – because your retinas quickly adjust - but even low light can be more irritating than a bright light if it flickers. This is why so many classic film noir scenes involve shining light up through a stair balustrade or through prison bars to make lines of shadow - the audience sense the actors discomfort as they move through the shadows - their retinas cannot adjust to the glare so they squint.

 

3. The bulb and the fitting.

Don’t go for a fancy bulb that you can only get from a specialist retailer, use small compact fluorescent bulbs you can buy in any corner shop and get ‘screw in’ bulbs because bayonet bulbs sag in the fitting. Buy a 45 degree fitting and a straight one to help you plan the design.

 

If you need dimmable lights then you will have to go with halogen bulbs, as the only dimmable fluorescent lights on the market are very fiddly to adjust. ‘GU’ style bulbs are better than ‘MR’ as they lock into the fitting. Also avoid ‘low energy’ lights that require transformers as the transformers still require the full 240 volts energy supply as well as requiring access.

 

Surface mounted lights are better than recessed lights as they (literally) get the light right into the room, and they are 100% efficient because any energy not turned into light is still turned into heat, warming the room. Recessed lights make the ceiling dark, they pour heat up, out of the roof, they’re difficult to access and make you home look like the teleporter on Star Trek.

 

Designing and making are not two separate stages of work - each should inform the other, so go to the space in question and repeatedly ask yourself “how should it look” and “how do I make it?”

 

Light is softened by refraction (which basically means breaking it up into lots of little beams) this can be done by shining it through frosted glass, translucent fabric or a perforated screen. The further the bulb is from the refracting surface, the more the light will be softened.

 

There are lots of styles of frosted glass to choose from. Many people go for acid etched / sand blasted, but I recommend ‘Artic’ as used in the Crittall windows of the 1940’s, being both pre-war and modernist ‘Artic’ is one of those rare design creatures that successfully manages to be both modern and traditional. Have the smooth (non-frosted) side uppermost so you don’t have to dust so often.

 

You don’t want to get the shape or size of glass wrong, so keep offering up card or board shapes into position. Once you are happy, give that template to your glass supplier and do pay the extra for them to deliver the glass.

 

It can look good to soften the light by shining it through a perforations - in Cologne there is a great café called Wash Machine Salon where the lamp shades are washing machine drums and the light comes through the holes, but before you start experimenting with colanders and tea strainers, remember this approach screens most of the light so you end up burning lots of energy for light you never actually see.

 

Using mirrors helps in two ways, firstly a mirror by a bulb will almost double the light in the room giving you more bang for your buck, but more importantly it will appear that the room is lit from two different lights, so around the edge of each shadow you will see a little a strip of semi-shadow. The more lights and mirrors you use, the more the edges of the shadows will dissolve. I always buy the dimmest bulbs in the shop because I know there will be a mirror next to it, doubling and diffusing what it gives me.

 

Don’t base your design on colored light bulbs as they are difficult to source and replace, there are better ways to colour a space. Light that bounces off a surface will be the colour of that surface, so if a wall has up-lighters and the ceiling is red, then the percentage of light bouncing back down into the room will also be red, giving the room a rose tint. The effect is subtler than shining light through coloured glass because of the spill; so if you bounce light off a surface chose a bold colour, but if you want to use glass paint or stained glass then go for a subtle colour. In that instance paint all the walls in your home pure brilliant white (as its easy to touch up any marks) so if you ever want to change the look of the room, just paint it with coloured light rather than coloured paint.

 

This is not a trifling technicality, the reason why there are so many jokes about this is precisely because changing a light bulb should be a simple practical every day task that can be performed by any unskilled person. You don’t want to have to disassemble the fitting every time a bulb needs changing so consider this from the outset and have a three inch gap so you can take the old light bulb out and put the new one in. Simple. By the way, it’s two – one to mix the Martinis and the other to phone the electrician.

 

Some people have so little to do with their time they have actually calculated the optimum amount of lux a room requires depending on its width, height and the reflectivity of the surfaces. If you wish to lose the will to live then I recommend you read Environmental Science in Building by Randal Mc Mullan, which has all the equations, graphs and ratios you could ever need.

 

Back in architecture school students would often use ‘quality of light’ as an alibi for dreadful steel and glass schemes, however there are lots of beautifully lit spaces that are actually quite dark in terms of lux - and I don’t just mean old churches or cottages. Apart from Paxton, all the great modernist architects ruthlessly controlled the amount and type of light, even Mies, Chareau and Neutra.

 

The four lights in my kitchen cost about £80 (total) with the bulbs, fittings, bits of mirror, brackets coming in at about a pound each - basically nothing. The real cost is in the time you spend mulling it over, but that’s what makes it rewarding (incidentally the total energy bill for my Victorian house is less than £45 per month).

 

There are more than 22 million homes in Britain, so lets say that means 100 million rooms. As energy becomes more and more of an economic, technical and political issue and governments reduce life to what is measurable, we should keep asking: “what about beauty?”