Working from home has now become the ‘new normal’ and it has been essential for people to create their own home offices to ensure they have a productive environment to work from. Whether you use a desk to work in the corner of your living room or have the luxury of having an allocated room for a home office, office lighting is an essential part of creating an effective workspace.
In this blog, we’ve created the ultimate guide to lighting your home office, so you can create a home office space with optimal lighting that allows you to stay stress-free and productive.
How to light your home office
Before you start choosing and arranging your office lighting, you should firstly consider the space you’re working with. You should look at the location of your windows, the amount of natural light coming into your space, and the placement of your desk and other furniture, as all of this will impact how much lighting you need.
Once you’ve determined all of this, you can start designing your home office lighting design.
What lighting fixtures should I use to light my home office?
Desk Lamps
One style of lighting most commonly used for office lighting is a desk lamp. Whilst not providing wide-spread light throughout the room, a desk lamp can provide effective task lighting without needing to take up a lot of room on your desk space.
When it comes to placement, a desk light should be positioned in a way that allows light to be evenly distributed across your desk, to ensure you’re not having to work in your own shadow. However, it is important to remember that you will only be lighting a surface that is inches away from where you’re working from, so here, it’s important to make sure you choose a low lumen light bulb.
Design is also an important factor too – you are, after all, looking at your desk setup all day, and nearly every day! Choosing a stylish desk lamp that can add character to your space as well as being practical will be your ideal combination. We have a variety of desk lamp and table lamp styles to choose from. You can browse the full range here.
If your home office is only small and you’re working with only a small desk, you could also consider installing wall lights above your desk. Though this type of light fixture is more commonly found on bed sides, they are still highly effective at providing task lighting in your office where desk space is at a minimum.
Floor Lamps
It’s also important to not only focus on lighting around your desk space, but the rest of your office as well. For an optimal office lighting layout, your entire room should be well lit to reduce any contrast which can be straining on your eyes and provide adequate lighting, no matter the time of day.
Floor lights are ideal for diffusing light over large surface areas in a room.
Ceiling Lights
A ceiling light for an office can be useful when carrying out multiple jobs that do not require specific task lighting. For example, when you need to move around your room organising documents and cleaning, a home office ceiling light could be a practical lighting choice.
Ceiling lights can also be useful when it comes to making video calls, too – the bright, even spread of light ceiling lights will help you to show up much better on camera, and create a great first impression!
When it comes to choosing ceiling lights, the height of your ceiling is an important consideration. But apart from that, the design of the ceiling light you choose can be based completely on your own personal style.
You can explore our range of ceiling light options here.
How to get the best home office lighting in a room with no windows
Mimic natural sunlight
Research shows that natural light increases productivity in the workplace, so where possible, why should this be any different in your home office? If you’re not exposed to natural light in your home office, the feeling of it can still easily be achieved with the use of smart light bulbs. These bulbs allow you to control the brightness of the bulb from a remote device and can be set to different tones of light throughout the day.
In the morning, it will be ideal to have a much cooler tone of light to help you feel energised and ready for the day. Once it gets later in the day and into the evening, a warmer shade of white light will allow you to relax and wind down from the working day.
Spread light evenly
If you don’t have access to any natural light, you’ll also want to make sure your artificial lighting is distributed evenly throughout your home office space.
You can achieve this by layering your lighting with a mixture of task, ambient, and general lighting. This will brighten every corner of your home office and ensure light is evenly diffused throughout.
How do I get the best home office lighting for laptop and computer work?
Reduce glare
While it’s always good to have natural lighting to fill out your office at home, it’s also important to consider where your technology is going to be positioned to avoid any glare. Not only can this glare be uncomfortable on your eyes, but it can also prevent you from seeing everything you need to on your computer screen.
Make sure that your desk is set up, so you are facing towards your window to ensure your screens aren’t backlit. However, try not to position yourself in front of direct sunlight, as it could shine too strongly at certain points in the day. If you still find that natural light is affecting the glare of your screen, you can manually adjust the brightness of your computer screen to the ideal setting that suits you.
Bias lighting
Bias lighting is a relatively new term, and refers to a light source that illuminates the wall or any surfaces behind your screen. By lighting the backside of your computer with subtle lighting, this will create bias lighting and help to limit the contrast between your bright monitor and other lighting features in your room.
LED strip lighting is the best way to achieve bias lighting and is used frequently in home offices. The LED strip lights can attach directly to the back of your monitor and be plugged into a nearby socket, making the set-up process incredibly easy.
Our RGB colour changing LED strip lighting can also be great to create bias lighting in your home office. As well as being remotely controlled, the colour of these LED strip lights can easily be changed and dimmed for a variety of effects.
Bright up your home office with Lightbulbs Direct
With the vast majority of people now working from home, having the perfect at home office set up is essential, and lighting it a key factor when creating this.
However, it’s important not to forget that your home is also a sanctuary, and your work life should be separated from your home life. To make sure you’re not overworking yourself, use dimmer switches and dimmable lightbulbs that can help you wind down after the workday.
When it comes to designing the lighting layout of your home office, there are a lot of things to consider. However, with our handy guide to home office lighting, we hope we’ve made the design process much easier.
If you’d like to browse our range of lighting for a home office, click here.