What is indoor lighting?
These fixtures are exactly what you think they are: Any lamp, pendant, or fixture used to illuminate your home’s interiors. They are typically made not just to brighten your space, but to add decor and overall enhance your current furniture setup. This includes the fixtures already installed in your home when you move in and any lamps or other fixtures you add. Importantly, indoor fixtures are often not waterproof and dustproof—important items for outdoor fixtures to have—so they should only be used inside at all times.
1. Recessed fixtures
Recessed fixtures are any indoor lights fully contained inside your walls, ceiling, or floors. While that wording might sound fancy or complex, it’s basically just the interior design way of describing the fixtures that lay flush with your ceiling or walls. On the other hand, fixtures that protrude from your walls, floors, or ceiling are not recessed.
2. Track lighting
Your home’s pre-installed fixtures aren’t the only way you can direct light from your ceiling toward your floors. Track lights mount to and protrude from your ceiling. They point directly downward, so you can use them to illuminate hallways or the very center of a room. They have a high-class and artistic feel, but you might need an electrician to help you properly install them.
3. Pendants
Pendants come in a wide range of colors and styles that seamlessly blend into any home decor. You can easily set up pendants by yourself (but having some friends help never hurts). Just attach some sturdy hooks to your ceiling, then run your pendant’s wire through your hooks and along walls and floors while keeping it out of view. Pendants are swanky like their track lighting counterparts, but they can be a lot easier to set up than track lights. So too can another type of indoor light often wrongly seen as challenging to install…
4. Wall sconces
Wall sconces extend from your wall to illuminate your hallways and side tables, so you might think that using them requires an electrician installing wiring behind your walls. But that isn’t always the case! Plug-in wall sconces solve this problem – just keep the wire well-hidden, plug it in, and securely mount your sconces. Chances are that nobody other than you will know that you’ve gone the plug-in route instead of making a more permanent investment.
5. Ceiling lighting
Speaking of permanent, if you need a consistent, reliable foundation for your indoor lighting design, install ceiling fixtures. We don’t mean just standard recessed ceiling fixtures – we mean chandeliers, pendants that you mount close to your ceiling, and even low-hanging lights. Without the much-needed lighting cornerstone that ceiling lights can provide, your indoor space, whether your living room, bedroom, or kitchen, might be imperfectly lit.