What is Mood Lighting?

Mood lighting is where you use lighting to create an atmosphere within a room. Mood lighting is often soft lighting that breaks up the light cast by more practical task lighting. It sits with task lighting and convenience lighting to help make up your complete lighting plan.

Where do you use mood lighting?

Mood lighting can be used in any room to enhance the space you are in. You need task lighting to go about your daily life, like under cabinet lights in your kitchen to see when you're chopping or the ceiling light in your lounge, but you can also enhance the space with mood lighting. It's often used to soften the decor in a room.

Dining Room and Living Room Mood Lighting

The classic example of mood lighting is a table lamp on your dining room sideboard or dresser, or a table lamp on your side table in the lounge combined with a floor lamp. By using these lights you can dim or turn off the main light to offer a softer mood when you are entertaining friends in the dining room or chilling in the living room at night.

Your main light in a room can also be used to create mood lighting, especially if you use a dimmer where the combination can provide a flexible solution. It can be used at full brightness for task lighting throughout the day and then dimmed in the evening to provide mood lighting.

Offering multiple lighting sources also casts different shadows and shades around the room which can change the feel from one part of the day to another. 

Don't forget to team up your lighting with your interiors colours to make the most of the style and feel of the room. Industrial style lighting and copper lights work really well with dark wall colours while light pendants with coloured shades can offer a beacon of light to cream or white rooms.

Kitchen Mood Lighting

You can carry mood lighting throughout the house, including the kitchen.

It's often overlooked but with people spending more time in the kitchen, using it as the family hub, having multiple light sources can give you a flexible solution to your kitchen lighting.

While under cabinet lights offer great task lighting they can also provide mood lighting by using dimmable under cabinet lights, or RGB lights that can change colour to suit the mood. 

The other option to use is to split the lighting styles, so use the under cabinet lights or downlights for the task lighting and use plinth lights for the mood lighting. As it's at floor level it doesn't catch the eye too much, but just offers some ambient glow to the room. Again these can be cool white, warm white or RGB colours to mix and match your colour to suit your mood. 

Another popular approach is to use one feature light or three light pendants on your kitchen island or breakfast bar to add mood lighting to your kitchen, leaving the downlights and under cabinet lights to provide the task lighting.

Bedroom Mood Lighting

Mood lighting in the bedroom is obviously an another great way to give extra flexibility to your living space.

It's relatively simple to give your bedroom a lighting make-over. Try combing table lamps with shades that produce softer light with a reading light to offer a happy medium between winding down from a long day while still being able to tuck in to the latest thriller.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this, you can go with a traditional table lamp with a separate clip-on reading light that attaches to the top of your bedside table, or alternatively if you are redecorating you can always look at putting in a wall light with an integral reading light, as shown in the picture. This light can be controlled using a switch at the base of the light or if you prefer it can be wired into a light switch next to your bed, as you often see if hotel rooms.

You also want some practical light for the mornings, so think about a decent light pendant in the middle of the room and don't forget task lighting, so perhaps a mirror light at the dressing table.

Again, if you're worried about the main light being too bright think about putting it on a dimmer, but don't forget if it's an LED light you will have to make sure you use an LED compatible dimmer switch.

Outdoor Mood Lighting

Mood lighting doesn't finish with the interiors of your house. It's easy to carry it through to your outdoor space too.

Task lighting, such as spotlights, floodlights and in-wall lights for steps can be invaluable for using your outdoors space in the dark, but it's also nice to enjoy the warm summer evenings (when we get them!).

Outdoor mood lighting tends to off softer light that still offers some light to your patio or outdoor space but without turning it into Blackpool illuminations. It can be a wall light or outdoor fairy lights or even IP rated plinth lights fitted into the steps of your decking.

You can also create a depth to your garden by highlighting a garden feature such as a tree or bush with a spotlight from the ground, but don't forget to think of nature. Birds can get confused by this type of lighting, so put it on a timer or don't forget to turn it off once you're done, so it doesn't stay on all night, disturbing our nocturnal friends.

Other Ideas

We have plenty more ideas to share, so why not pop into our showroom to talk to one of the team or take a look at our Pinterest profile. We have collated a huge range of lighting ideas from the Pinterest community, we're sure you'll find some inspiration there too.

As always, if you are still stuck please don't hesitate to call one of our customer service team who are on-hand to answer any queries. Call us on 02920 004 887.