Designing A Home With Little Natural Light *

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Much home renovation and interior design advice rests on improving or maximizing the use of natural light. It’s not hard to see why, as the more light you can allow into your home, the more beautiful, vibrant, radiant, open, airy, and inviting it looks. That’s not to say you should have direct sunlight pouring into the room without any use of shade or ambience, but manipulating this light to your advantage is often the healthiest step forward.

But not all homes enjoy natural access to sunlight throughout most of the year. Perhaps you live in an apartment next to another large tower, perhaps you live in an urban environment with larger buildings, or perhaps a protected treeline limits how well the sun travels into part of your household.

In these situations (which are quite common), it’s best to implement your creativity to find a healthy solution. That’s the goal of this post; as we intend to help you design that home to still feel as radiant as it should be:

Texture & Colour

Texture and colour genuinely do play into the kind of home you design, and how comfortable you are when designing such a space. For example, marble dining sets can help reflect light thanks to their bright colours and ornate inlays or decorations. You should also consider Herringbone Flooring when choosing your flooring as it is a good way to enhance the space in your home. This is because the zig-zag pattern draws your eyes in and makes the room appear bigger and brighter. 

Limiting Overbearing Fixtures

It’s good to do all you can to prevent a dark room from feeling darker. So for example, instead of the ornate lampshade you might use with a light fixture, you could opt for a bright amber-white tone instead, making certain the entire space feels as bright as possible and no undue shadows are cast. With this and brighter furnishings, you should hopefully ensure that any reflected light around the room keeps the space welcoming, open and inviting, as opposed to limited and soaked in shadow.

Corner Decorations

In darker rooms, it’s always wise to keep most of the decorations or furnishings to its corners or walls. This is because having any furniture item of note, even in a large room, can quite easily impede the flow of light from one area to another. For example, a large bed in the middle of a room could prevent a window from one side window lighting the room as well as it could. For this reason, pressing the bed under the window will help it allow for maximum light coverage. If you have no way around this, you might want to change up where the light source is coming in, such as through a skylight you could install.

With this advice, you can decorate a home with little natural light, despite how difficult that initial prospect may seem. Just keep at it, and you’re sure to find the correct balance.

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