Home: Easy ways to brighten up winter rooms by day and night
When winter is too hard to face, try a Philips SmartSleep, wake-up light; From €120.
As we approach the winter solstice, short, dark days can get to anyone. For some of us, these oppressive doldrums can seriously impact mental health. Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD is all too real, influencing the hypothalamus and upending the vital circadian rhythm vital for healthy sleep.
Talk to your GP about any issues you may have, including the potential of a dedicated, super-bright daylight lamp (10,000 lux plus) for 30 minutes a day, and a daybreak alarm clock that replicates the soft, gathering sunshine of dawn. Then, try these universal hacks to lift that challenging outdoor gloom.
We need to welcome in every bit of natural light on offer and back it up with electric lighting by day where needed. Let that illumination travel, rather than being ingested by dark, matt materials. Window light can be heavily impeded by the wrong choice of curtains or blinds. Properly detailed, airtight, double and triple-glazed windows and frames have low “U” values. Their thermal performance doesn’t require curtains as insulators. With single and older double glazing, passive thermal gain from even weak watery winter sunshine can actually make pulling back curtains a plus.
The full area marked out by the window frame is termed the reveal. In the winter, by day, we want to both clean, shine and maximise that area. Using a curtain pole, a 10cm area clearing the vertical reveal, will allow curtains to be fully drawn back off glazing.
Blinds hung on the wall, outside of the reveal, will again, allow you to tug them right up and away (unless the depth of your framing allows the blind to sit well up and off the glass). Using a south-facing windowsill as a shelf, the clutter can rob a good swathe of light-gathering glass.
Shrouding the sill also prevents it from acting as a handy reflector of daylight. Clear it off, and freshen the paintwork in white.
Having pruned any outdoor planting near windows and glazed doors, use light drifting sheers to break up intrusive views, distilling harsh, direct light, and disrupting the outline of things you don’t want to see.
Perfect blinds can pull up from the bottom too, leaving the skylight unimpeded. Double roller blinds like the Eros Snowdrop range deliver a white roller blind, with blackout coating for nighttime shading. To the rear, there's the soft sunscreen. Prices from €38, blinds2go.ie. Teaming translucent blinds to curtains raked well back from the reveal by day — setting the scene and mitigating glare to the centimetre.
Now, we want to multiply and scatter all available light, natural and artificial. It’s time to lift and shift. If you have a very large vertical mirror, suited to floor-standing, it’s time for a little MGM magic. Try it in various stable positions to catch, reflect and multiply even artificial light sources, killing shadows and softening the edges of the room.
We don’t want uncomfortable reflections straight up to the groin, or wincing glare trained into the faces of sitters. Use a steady step ladder to prop and test hanging mirrors before unholstering the drill, garnering the most useful and welcome illumination. Start with positions directly opposite windows, tracing the arc of the sun, aiming the light into dark pockets of the room or towards other reflective material to scatter and bounce light.
Pale and shiny surfacing can improve the bleakest interior landscape. Even smooth leather textures have pleasing highlights. Try moving furniture around like the Scandinavians do every winter. Evict dark artwork to reveal available white or pale walls. Re-dress the room with mood-altering neutral and metallic throws, sofas covers, or faux fur rugs over the backs over deep, dark sofas. Heap on those iridescent cushions in fragile, soft linens, sequins — whatever you fancy. In the bedroom, use cosy, lightly toned linens and bedspreads, and move the bed closer to the window, especially if you suffer from
Looking up to the shelves, mix up blank runs of light-swallowing books with free-standing mirrors, framed artwork, glossy house plants and reflective ornaments. Large, glazed pictures can flash light back across the room even at oblique angles to the window. A curated collection in a gallery wall, will multiply this impact. Obviously, don’t position valuable prints or precious photographs in direct light — UV damage is permanent. Move your favourite reading chair closer to a low window, and wash a couple of trees near the house with solar-powered up-lighters for a mesmerising, forever view.
Shimmering wallpapers, light paint colours in satin finishes to woodwork and vinyl sheens to walls are proven light multipliers, and you can use a single feature wall facing into a great window to dial up the daylight. Test the colour over the course of day on a large tear of paper. Move it around lamps, and near walls, showing the gradations of colour and reflection in that aspect. Broke?
My favourite cheat is framing up cheerfully schemed wallpaper samples as large, ornate light deflectors on a broody, dark wall.
Don’t trust a pure, unadulterated white to solve winter blues. On the north or west side of the house with any extra interference of shading through trees, it could deliver an insipid, haunting bile green. Layers of warm neutral colour are often better. Dramatic, moody colour cloaking the ceiling? There’s a sound reason ceilings are used as large diffusers in white. Up out of your eye-line, they have a proven talent to lighten the decorative load beneath.
Adding light, layer on more electric light points rather than increasing bulb strength to a clinical level. Before considering bulb wattage and colour, understand that the bulb and its housing work as one. If 6000lm LED bulbs are in a fitting with an opaque shade or a fitting with blank metal on four sides, the light will be dimmed, tightly directed, or diffused. Still, adding economical LED light sources to available daylight can be a revelation.
The strength of modern bulbs to light a room is given in Lumens (lm) — 75w in an old incandescent bulb equates to about 720Lm.
Wyse bulbs, at 9.5w, and 800lm, deliver the same light as an old 60w bulb with a ton of smarts (€33 for a pack of two which could last 18 years). Working individually, you simply name them all and then use your mobile device to dial in your chosen colour temperature. Around 25w/250lm of light per square metre will be adequate for most rooms.
Multiply 25 by your square metres for the total watt equivalent needed for the room. 2,000-4,000lm is about right for a standard living room adding up all the artificial light sources. If the ceiling is especially high, you may have to play with these lumen figures. If it’s low, use your ceiling lamps to bounce light off glossy surfacing. Try a small, glazed picture standing beneath a pool of light delivered by any 400lm to 450lm table lamp or train an angle-capable lamp onto any reflective surface to let those lumens fly.
