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Decorative lighting isn’t just for holidays and special celebrations. It’s an important part of any home or office lighting scheme. Lighting a room is so much more than just installing a single powerful fixture and hoping for the best. It’s about layering your lighting and one of those versatile layers is decorative lighting.

The versatility of decorative lighting comes not only from the myriad types of decorative fixtures available, but also from the different kinds of light those fixtures produce. An intricate chandelier is obviously a decorative fixture, but it can also produce ambient light.

It’s perhaps useful to talk briefly about the different types or layers of light. Ambient or general lighting is the largest category, as many different lights provide or add to ambient light. The basic idea is that ambient light should be flat and neutral providing a kind of baseline light for the room. The best ambient light is diffuse to cut down on harsh glare and pronounced shadows. It should make everything feel evenly and comfortably lit.

While even, comfortable lighting is great, if all you have is even, comfortable lighting, you’ll find it hard to do other specific things. That’s where task lighting comes in. A thoughtfully positioned lamp, lights around a mirror, under-cabinet LEDs: these are all examples of light that is specifically designed to aid in completing some specialized task such as reading a book, applying makeup, or cooking a meal.

Accent lighting and decorative lighting are similar and in some cases could be considered two sides of the same coin. Accent lighting can be, and often is, decorative. But for the purposes of this article it’s worth pointing out a few subtle distinctions. We’ll define accent lighting as lighting that specifically highlights a thing, whether that’s a piece of art, landscaping, or a facade. A spotlight illuminating the facade of a building or track lighting trained on a painting on the wall are common forms of accent lighting.

Of course decorative lighting overlaps with accent lighting and spills over into ambient lighting, and, if you really want to push it, can be a kind of task lighting, if, for example, the fixture used for a given task could be considered decorative in its own right. For our purposes it may be helpful to think of decorative lighting as lighting for lighting’s sake. There are dining room tables with color-changing LEDs integrated into the table’s design. Wallpaper with little embedded LEDs that glow and become part of the pattern. Cove and soffit lighting, while certainly a component of ambient lighting is also decorative by nature. Decorative lighting may sound superfluous, but it’s a critical component in making your space your own. It helps define it. It’s a way for you to express your style while still having the practical application of lighting your space.

Decorative lighting is a bit of a deceptive term. Because it’s not just about decoration. It adds to the overall light in a room. It helps further reduce shadows and provides multiple sources of light to more evenly light the space. It also serves as a visual break for the eye. If most of your room’s illumination comes from recessed can lights, adding a decorative fixture, especially one that hangs from the ceiling or otherwise is in some kind of relief from the walls or ceiling will tie the rest of the room together.

Further proving that everything old is new again, one of the most common components of modern decorative lighting is the vintage-style Edison exposed filament LED bulb. These bulbs utilize tiny LED chips arranged in such a way that they mimic the look of century-old bulbs with pronounced, visible filaments. These bulbs, while beautiful, were extremely inefficient by today’s standards. Modern technology has made it possible to mimic the look while providing tons of energy savings.

Whether your decorative light is a pendant fixture with an exposed vintage-style LED bulb, or a modern chandelier that uses opaque LED globes, SunLake Lighting has what you need to keep that fixture, and your space, beautiful. Below are just some of the products SunLake carries that are used in many decorative fixtures. For a full list of SunLake’s products, click here.

Chandeliers

Lamps, sconces, string lights, pendants

Cove, soffit, and valence lighting