Bathroom Wall Lights – Useful Advice When Buying
If, like most people, your bathroom is simply a ‘pit-stop’ room at either end of your day, you’re missing a trick or two. Simply by paying attention to the way you illuminate what is possibly the smallest room in your home can make an enormous difference to the way you feel about it. Bathroom lighting is a sorely neglected art, which is such a shame because something as simple and undemanding as bathroom wall lights could change the way you start your day.
Kyoto 0572 Bathroom wall light
For both ambience and functionality, wall-mounted bathroom lights really do offer the best of both worlds – providing that you choose and use them properly. When it comes to choice, you’ll be spoilt; there are styles and designs out there to satisfy even the pickiest designer; however correct installation of bathroom wall lights is key to getting the best out of them.
Before you even begin to think about style, cost and lighting effects, however, you really must have at least a basic grasp of the European Bathroom Lighting Regulations, which have been put in place to ensure your safety. The regulations specify exactly where certain light fittings can safely be sited within the bathroom and all bathroom lighting is zone marked.
In most modern bathrooms, which are, shall we say, bijoux, just placing wall lights around the mirror area will be enough to provide soft ambient light as well as exceptionally practical task lighting.
For task lighting in particular, the closer you can get to ‘daylight coloured’ light the better; both halogen lamps and LED lights will help in this respect. The real secret to good bathroom task lighting though is the position of the lights. Get it wrong and you’ll see ugly shadows beneath your eyes when you look into the mirror – even if you don’t have any! To eliminate shadows, light needs to come from all directions and illuminate all the planes of your face equally; that is the theory behind those oh so glamorous movie star dressing room mirrors.
Mashiko 0583 Bathroom wall light
Light fittings around the mirror should cast light in four directions, that is, from above and below and from either side, in order to eliminate those pesky shadows. Hollywood style mirrors had their basis in functionality! To achieve this happy state of affairs in less than movie-star style, place one wall light above the mirror, and one either side at around eye level. If your mirror is large, say 1 metre across or more, you will find that the side lights don’t provide adequate illumination. In this instance, an overhead light will fill in the gaps.
So, that’s the task lighting sorted; now to sort out the ambience. By switching your bathroom light fittings separately you will achieve a truly versatile system. For shaving or applying make up, just switch on the wall lights both above and beside the mirror but, when languishing in the bath, forget those side lights and just turn on the wall light above the mirror. If you have a dimmer switch, which will need to be located outside of the bathroom, you can have the lights down nice and low too.
A few candles, et voila, instant sanctuary.
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Tags: bathroom wall light, bathroom wall lighting, Bathroom Wall Lights
