How To Choose The Best Lighting For Your Home Office 2024

Introduction

Most people care about shopping for big items like a desk, chair, and filing system when preparing a home office. They forget about the lighting for a home office, and still, poor home office lighting can lead to headaches and eyestrain and cannot improve mood. Considering the notable amount of time we spend working, creating a setting with optimal lighting makes sense. Planning the right lighting for your home office is very significant.

A home office is a place to read, work, send emails, and so on. Lighting directly affects the productivity of people. To obtain the best results from your office, layer the lighting to make a comfortable space that you can easily adjust during the day. From daylight and window treatments to overhead lighting and lamps that illuminate your home office, read this helpful article to get an idea of how to choose the right lighting for a home office.

Evaluate The Room

A strategic home office lighting plan makes everything different, regardless of your working style and the times you use your home office (using it once a week to pay bills or using it every day for a certain time). First, check that how natural light affects your office during certain times of the day.

Consider where the shadows fall and figure out how you want to utilize the space. Remember to follow the direction of lighting; make sure to place your workstation somewhere to avoid glare on your computer screen. Think about the best way to arrange your office furniture. Implement shades, curtains, and drapes to control the glare if required.

Lookup

Overhead lighting can be complicated. For instance, overhead lighting stabilized in the wrong place can create annoying glare, although the lack of overhead lighting also can be distracting. Besides, overhead lighting cannot compliment your natural lighting just by itself and establish the room’s overall lighting level.

Ambient lighting creates an opportunity for you to add some style to your home office and make new focal points with your décor. Recessed lighting also works well. However, it can create hot spots and a dull look. Instead, apply a flush mount ceiling light, a sleek pendant, or an elegant chandelier to complement the office's decor and illuminate your workspace.

Pro tip: pendants and chandeliers are required to be hanged in the center of the ceiling, at least 6 feet above your finished floors.

Stay On Task

To be sure of large lighting in your work area, task lights are essential. Task lighting will diminish eyestrain and helps relieve the sleepy feeling that can creep up in a poorly illuminated room. Pick simple fixtures with clean lines and a small base that does not take too much space on your desk.

Search for task lighting models with an adjustable head and arm. Those are perfect for adjusting when required. Think about where to place a task light; because it can create distracting shadows or an irritating glare if placed in the wrong spot. If you are right-hand dominated, place the lamp on the opposite side of your desk because placing the lamp on the same side creates shadows as you write.

Pro tip: choose LED light bulbs. They are eco-friendly and also help to avoid the heat generated by incandescent bulbs.

Add The Finishing Touches

Well-arranged decorative or accent lights highlight specific areas and helps the overall atmosphere of the room. Use track lighting with movable downlights placed 24 inches from the wall to spotlight valuable artwork and architectural features in the room. Add a mild, warm shine with decorative wall sconces positioned close to your seating area.

Do not ignore the light bulbs. Select bulbs that have the same temperature to give the office a balanced look and mood. For instance, if you utilize incandescent bulbs in your overhead light, then pick warm LED bulbs for your task lighting for a cohesive effect that works with all of your home office lightings.

Types Of Lighting

You will need to include and combine three types of lighting to layer your home office lighting properly:

1. Ambient Lighting

Ambient lighting is also called general lighting and is the light you utilize to enter a room and move around it safely. Normally, ambient lighting is provided by two ceiling and wall fixtures. It is often the basic layer of lighting, and most rooms will benefit from at least one or two fixtures specifically for this task. But, when you are talking about home office lighting, you need to be sure the ambient light creates a very even level of illumination.

A decent layer of equally scattered ambient lighting enables you to implement other types of lighting without creating dramatic shadows and other lighting problems that can cause eyestrain and fatigue. It is suggested that lights be placed on a dimmer switch whenever possible, but it is significant for ambient lights because it enables you to adjust them during the day and fit the light to your work.

2. Task Lighting

You will need a good quality task lamp in any area of your home office where you perform tasks like reading, writing, or computer work. Task lighting gives you a bright, concentrated light that enables you to easily see the details of what you are doing without putting too much pressure on your eyes. Task lighting should be placed at your desk, close to your reading chairs, or in any other areas that you may like to sit down and work.

3. Accent Lighting

Accent lighting emphasizes significant items and architectural details you want to highlight. If you have any awards, diplomas, certificates, or artwork that you would like to display in your home office, you need to add a layer of accent lighting to help emphasize them.

What Is The General Strategy For Lighting Your Home Office?

Add the right lights to your home office is similar to dressing for climate changeable weather: It is just about layering. Considering the range of activities you want to do in your workspace, such as reading, filing, working at a computer, talking on the phone, holding meetings, these are all focus-intensive tasks that you cannot properly illuminate through one light source alone.

To illuminating your office with even and soothing warmth, start with ambient light. It is intelligent to place your ambient lights on a dimmer switch, so you have the possibility to change light levels based on the time of day and the type of work you are doing. Complete this focal source of light with task lamps on the desk and other key spots.

Overhead lights or ceiling-mounted fixtures can sometimes be the reason for annoying glare on your computer screen. If you have this problem in your office, you do not necessarily need to turn them on. Instead, build an even ambient light by implementing a light fixture that can bounce the light off the walls and ceilings.

What Is The Role Of The Task Lamp?

Task lights create a concentrated light source for specific activities. If you are doing various activities in your office, it would be best to have a dedicated task light for each of your workstations. Movable arms are perfect for accommodating a range of setups.

Why Is The Position Of The Light Source Important?

Where you positioned your lights is significant to avoid glare and shadows. For example, if your desk position is in the way that an overhead spotlight is placed behind you, then it can cause glare on your computer screen. To prevent shadows created by task lamps, put them on the side opposite from the hand you dominantly write with; otherwise, your hand and arm will cast shadows.

What About Sunlight?

Sunlight improves the mood of any room, creates a nice warmth feeling which, in turn, helps focus and productivity. Some family likes to work in the living room because living rooms are normally so sunny. However, in some rooms at certain times of day, direct sunlight can create an annoying glare. You can lessen this by installing simple translucent blinds. If you have a window in your home office and are working at a computer, the best place for your desk is perpendicular to the window. Placing your computer in front of the window can force tension in your eyes because the brightness from behind the screen may create too much of a contrast.

How Can Lighting Reduce The Effects Of Working At A Computer All Day?

Minimizing glare and contrast is crucial to reducing eye strain. Unpleasant artificial or natural light is what creates the screen glare that tires our eyes. Having your lights on dimmers and hanging light-diffusing blinds in your windows enables you to control light levels during the day, based on the time of day and what you are doing. It would be best if you kept in mind that paperwork activities require a higher light level than computer work, which means that most of us when at our computers, need to consider reducing the ambient light and turning off-task lighting.

Some Tips To Remember When Installing New Home Office Lighting

Following, you will find some other things to consider whenever you are taking on a project that involves installing new lighting:

A lot of things, such as the floor area of your home office, the number of windows that permit daylight to pass through, your work schedule, and the kind of work you will do there are the important factors that control the amount of light you need in your home office. You do not need to buy many ambient light fixtures when your home office benefits from daylight thanks to windows. On the other hand, if your home office is limited to the walls with no window, overhead lighting or wall-mounted lamps could be the best option.

If you find out that your light switches are not working for whatever reasons, check for loose wire connections, bare wires touching the electrical box, damaged wire ends, or cracked light switches to help diagnose the problem. However, it is better to hire a qualified electrician to avoid any accidents.

Buying light fixtures that are energy-saving is another thing worth considering. Finding energy-saving light options is not as difficult as it was in the past because the European Union has recently banned the sale of halogen bulbs and asked retailers to replace their goods supply with energy-efficient options, such as LEDs or compact fluorescent bulbs.

Conclusion

A single source of lighting is not adequate to cover the varied activities of a home office; layering the light sources is the best.
Utilize task lamps to provide light for focused work.
Take care of the correct placement of a task light to prevent glare and shadows.
Sunlight boosts the mood of a room, but certain times of day can be too bright.
Enabling to change light levels during the day is perfect for the eyes and promotes productivity.

Your working space has a lot of impact on how you will do your work. It is crucial to spend adequate time planning your home office lighting. These tips can guide you in how to get started. However, you may want to experiment with different types and fixtures before finding what works best for you.

I trust you enjoyed this blog post. Please stay tuned for more articles like this to come. Take care!

JeannetteZ

Your Opinion Is Important To Me

I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and/or suggestions about this article in the comments section below. You can also reach me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.