Accent lighting to elevate your home
Your home is your largest investment, and as such you should highlight every architectural and decorative feature that you have lovingly chosen. Low voltage lighting is the perfect way to make color pop, fill space above beams with gentle light and and dim niches to create warmth.
Whether your home is contemporary or traditional, coastal or rustic, low voltage LED lighting raises the bar when it comes to your interior finish.
Niche Lights
Niche lights are perfect for cabinet lighting or niches. Not only do they add light to highlight the angles of the space but they don’t burn out in the way that standard high voltage lights have a tendency toward. Available in various color temperatures and with shrouds, these tiny puck fixtures pack a punch but can be dimmed to a delicate glow.
Accent Lights
When you invest in architectural features such as beams and angled ceilings, it’s so important that you light them correctly. By filling an otherwise empty space with light, or grazing a wall you are cleverly highlighting textures and shapes to add dimension to the space.
Tape Light
Tape light is ideal for casting light behind or under shelved, bars, floating vanities or from ceilings. It can also be used to light steps and beams, to show off the design of your home and crate a glow in hallways for nighttime visibility.
Low voltage lighting considerations
Low voltage lighting ideally needs to be talked about before construction starts. Determine with your lighting partner which wiring needs to be run behind the walls to the driver which will control the dimming of the fixture. The driver will connect to the wall switch so your electrician needs to know what’s going to go where during the final installation.
Another consideration is around the color temperature of the rest of your lighting fixtures in each room. If you intend to have bright white pendant lighting, then go for a tunable white light low voltage fixture. Otherwise you could end up with warm yellow lights in your cabinets which won’t compliment the white pendants as they wont dim to the same hue.
Warm Dim Lighting
Warm dim lighting replicates older incandescent lighting, which in turn replicates natural light. As your dim these lights they change from a white hue to a warmer, more yellow hue, in the same way that as sunset glows.
This creates a more natural dim effect.
Here are some examples of warm dim cove lighting from Proxluxe by American Lighting.
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Lighting Control
Once you have your low voltage lights installed you can control them in a number of ways. Firstly, they can be wired to your traditional wall switch or toggle dimmer. You can also add a wireless smart switch to handle a particular lighting load, which you can set on a timed schedule. This means the fixture will dim at the same time each evening.
Finally, you can bring that load into a scene such as “relax” or “entertain”. Ideal for centralized lighting systems these are generally controlled by a button a keypad from Lutron or Crestron and can also be on a set schedule which is unique to you.
So many options to ensure your lighting truly shows off your decor, your style and the architecture of your luxury home.
