How to Light a Living Room

Five sources, three heights: two table or floor lamps at seat level, a reading light where reading happens, something low behind the seating for depth, and the ceiling fixture on a dimmer as backdrop rather than lead. The room should work with the ceiling light off entirely.

One central source flattens a living room into an evenly lit box: no depth, no zones, and a shadow wherever you stand. Every working scheme for this room is plural — sources at more than one height, switched in more than one group, so the room can change register through the day.

A living room is hired for conversation first and screens second, and the layout says which one it believes in. Seats that face each other within 2.5m make talk easy; seats lined up at a television make an audience. The best rooms solve both with one arrangement — a sofa and two chairs at an L, the screen off-axis — and keep a clear route through that never crosses the middle of a conversation. The lighting follows those hours: bright and even when the room is working, warm and low when it is winding down — and the switch layout is what lets one room do both.

Every lamp at the same height, which flattens the room to one plane. And in every room: bulbs of mixed colour temperature in one view, which reads as a fault even when nobody can say why.