Chicago Sky Box Makeover

Successful interior designed is underpinned by a few basic laws that govern space, light, color, materials, and I think that lighting is probably the most fundamental. You can use lighting to use a big statement, you can take a big dull room and turn it into something vibrant and exciting or you can make a serene, relaxing, calming space.

Simply put, light is good for us. Science has proved that humans are drawn to light just as plants are drawn towards the sun. A sort of human phototropism, the second aspect of lighting is the plugin kind. A really dramatic lighting scheme can transform your room in an instant. From light and functional, to atmospheric and moody.

We find gloomy rooms to difficult to live in, we don’t see well in them and that makes us feel uncomfortable. It may be something very primeval. If you’re in a light environment, you tend to be happier, see better, and are more comfortable, and that’s because we need it to survive.

At a basic level, colors in light affect our hormones, our health, our mood, even science describes color as sensation. Hence the fact that specific color have a big impact on us, and our take on color is highly personal. You have your preferences, and I certainly have mine. And our decision on color. Our decisions on which color we love, and loathe will almost certainly be made before we hit puberty.

But to understand lighting, you have to understand that it’s more than just switches, sockets, and bulbs. This transformation is about how to use light in space. There are two aspects of lighting you need to bear in mind before starting a design scheme. The first is making the most daylight. Natural light enriches our home. And by understanding its affects you can transform your surroundings.

Light is much more than something that simply lets you see. It affects the way we feel, and directly influences our mood. Expressions such as “feeling in the dark” or of course “seeing the light” are essential for our understanding of the planet. As species, we now spend more time indoors than ever before. Almost 90% of our day.

The wonderful yet complicated thing about color is that affects every aspect of our lives, even our bodies. Because you can be feeling a little off color, you can be “in the pink”, you can be having a “black mood”, you can be “seeing red” and of course you can go “white as a sheet”.

The reason colors are so important to us is that our visual senses are so highly developed. Each of our eyes contain about 37 million light sensitive receptors. The white light we see is made up of different wavelengths, each being a different color of violet which is the shortest wavelength to red which is the longest. Each one of these colors are received and recognized from a different pathway in the brain.