For a time, track lighting was a fairly cheesy choice. But that was never inherent in the design. Any form of lighting can look poor when the lighting scheme and fixture design are weak. It’s also true that overuse of any one style will get old when it becomes overwhelmingly common.
But new styles have brought [...]

One of the latest crazes in home lighting is the use of motion sensors. But there’s nothing crazy about this craze. It makes perfect sense. Whether used for security or convenience, motion sensors can add a very useful high-tech touch to lights both outdoor and in.
The most obvious application, and one in wide use today, [...]

More and more homes today have a separate area or even an entire room of the house dedicated to home entertainment. Extensive stereos and home theater systems have become common. Lighting the areas where they reside presents interesting challenges.
Images on large HDTV or projection TVs look best when the lighting scheme is done right. The [...]

For many years the pros and cons of incandescent versus fluorescent lights have been described. With the addition of CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights), LED and other technologies the debate has shifted somewhat. But, first, some elementary science…
Incandescent bulbs acquired the name because what they do is, in essence, burn (i.e. incandesce, or glow with heat). [...]

The three aspects of lighting - ambient, task and accent - apply to exterior lighting just as they do for interior illumination. But the way they’re implemented will be very different.
Where an interior room angle is, say, 90 degrees the outside corner is also thought of as 90 degrees. But, measured the same way, it’s [...]

Edison’s invention is about 100 years old. It’s about time we thought about using something a little more up to date.
Actually Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He improved it, devising one in 1879 that burned for 40 hours, achieving 1,220 hours a year later (a number a little better than modern incandescent bulbs, 750-1,000 [...]

You buy a bulb at the store, put it into a fixture and flip the switch. On comes a light. What could be simpler?
True, many home lighting situations are as easy as that. But if you want to get the most out of your budget, and also to design a more pleasing and practical home [...]

For decades the choice came down to an incandescent bulb or a fluorescent. Even with the relatively recent introduction of CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights), incandescents almost always won. CFLs are much more expensive and still don’t give off the same spectrum of natural-looking light that ‘ordinary’ bulbs come much closer to.
Enter LEDs.
Light emitting diodes have [...]

Garage lighting often gets little attention. An incandescent bulb or two, maybe a fluorescent fixture and it’s considered finished. But a garage can have many uses and lighting is often poorly designed for most of them.
Even such a simple act as parking the car and walking into the house can be compromised by poor lighting [...]

Good bedroom lighting considers a careful mixture of practical and psychological factors. The average bedroom has so many different uses - relaxation, intimacy, study, morning preparation - that covering them all can be tricky.
We associate the bedroom with, among other things, sleep. That usually means no lights at all. That suggests that turning them off [...]