Stunning Indirect Lighting Ideas for Your Cozy Home

Lighting your room is one of the ways you can improve its appearance. However, applying the right light requires that you have the right balance between direct and indirect lighting to benefit your interior design style. For example, you can employ some indirect lighting ideas to make your room appear bigger or reduce light glare in your room.

Indirect lighting ideas range from using light fixtures such as wall sconces, lamps, LED strip lights, and other indirect light fixtures to creating ambient lighting in your space. They can be attached to walls, floors, or furniture; some may come with dimmer switches.

In this article, you’ll understand what indirect lighting is. You’ll also know what light sources can give you indirect lighting and how you can achieve indirect lighting with the appropriate light fixtures. Ultimately, you’ll have some indirect lighting ideas from which you can draw inspiration.

What Is an Indirect Source of Light?

Have you experienced the extra-bright glare that comes off your ceiling with pendant lights? That’s one of the characteristics of some direct light sources. However, an indirect light source is usually ambient lighting, discouraging glares. Instead, they reflect light rays from the ceiling, walls, or the floor, depending on where they’re installed.

An important property of an indirect light source is the soft and even reflection it gives against solid surfaces. However, this property doesn’t create reflective hotspots, even with TV or computer screens.

What Are Some Examples of Indirect Lighting?

Indirect lighting is achieved by using light fixtures that provide warm glows that adequately light a room but at a reduced brightness level. Some examples of indirect lighting include:

Ambient Lighting

Ambient lighting is usually an excellent choice of lighting for setting the mood in any room. It lights the general area of your space and is characteristically visually warm in its glow. They are suitable for every part of your home but provide the best aesthetics in the living room, dining area, bedroom, and kitchen.

You can achieve ambient lighting by using any of the following light fixtures.

Floor Lamps

Lamps are the commonest indirect lighting fixture in any home. The light source usually contains a feature that helps with the divergence of light rays around the room. Floor lamps are commonly used in living rooms and bedrooms. However, they can be in the hallways, too.

LED Strip Lights

For colorful, warm, and glowy lights around the room, LED strip lights are excellent for producing ambient lighting and are a good indirect light fixture. They can come in combinations of colors or uniform colors.

You’ll mostly find LED strip lights in false ceilings, providing their glow around the upper layer of the room. However, furniture pieces, such as entertainment centers, can also have LED light strips.

Wall Sconces

As the name implies, wall sconces are attached to the wall and provide ambient light around them. In addition, they add some aesthetics to your room and hallways by casting a warm glow on the wall. The light rays reflect off the wall and illuminate some important features of the wall, such as artworks.

To eliminate shadows, you may need a good number of wall sconces for total ambient lighting.

Good to Read: Open Concept Lighting Ideas

Indirect Lighting Ideas for Your Rooms

While it may be difficult to get indirect lighting right for your room if it wasn’t part of your plan, you can achieve it with these indirect lighting ideas that you can apply to your room.

In this section, you’ll find indirect lighting ideas that apply to different rooms in your home.

Living Room Indirect Lighting Ideas

Here are some indirect lighting ideas you can use to improve the appearance and reduce the glare of light in your living room.

LED Lights in False Ceiling

The Ceiling bears light fixtures to illuminate the living room. However, it mostly carries direct lighting fixtures such as hanging, pendant, and recessed light fixtures. For indirect lighting on the ceiling, installing a false ceiling, and placing LED lights with high lumens, will help you achieve indirect lighting in the living room.

The glow of the colored LED light illuminates the living room and casts no shadow anywhere. However, it has support from the wall sconces.

Wall Mounted Modular Strip Light

Modular lights help to provide illumination through a thin LED strip. You can apply many strips vertically, horizontally, or diagonally along your wall. Place your Modular lights at corners or in the middle of walls to illuminate both sides.

You can apply your strip modular light above an artwork, on the wall behind your sofa, or between your living room and the hallway.

Bedroom Indirect Lighting Ideas

You want as little bright light as possible in your bedroom to help you relax better. Here are some indirect lighting ideas for your bedroom.

Simple Cove Lighting over Bed

On what will be your accent wall in your bedroom, you can have a singular cove light that illuminates the entire room by employing LED light.

The warm and not-too-bright glow of the cove light casts a comfortable light over the walls behind your bed and lulls you to sleep faster. This indirect lighting idea is ideal for minimalist bedrooms.

Hidden Bed Lighting and False Ceiling Lights

Your bedroom can also have a false ceiling that hides some LED strip lights. The light fixture provides colored lights that permeate the upper layer of the room. However, the lower layer of the room receives illumination from hidden bed lighting that makes the piece of furniture appear to be floating.

Hidden colored light under the bed combines with the colored light from the false ceiling to light the bedroom. However, wall sconces also provide more light in the bedroom, eliminating the possibility of shadows in the room.

Kitchen Indirect Lighting Ideas

The kitchen requires task lights to work on the countertops and kitchen island. However, you also need ambient light to set the right mood around the kitchen and dining area. Here are some functional indirect lighting ideas for the kitchen and dining area.

Ambient Lighting under Cabinets

Whether floor or wall cabinets, you can install some strip lights of the same or different colors under the cabinet. The light fixtures provide illumination that reflects throughout its immediate area and casts a warm glow around the kitchen.

Strip light under the cabinets that form the kitchen island sets the mood for a romantic dinner when the need arises.

Indirect Lighting Between Wall Cabinets and the Ceiling

The space between the wall cabinets and the ceiling in the kitchen is usually empty, as most homes cannot accommodate any sizeable thing. However, you can make them useful by applying some ambient lighting fixtures in that space.

Strip lights are small enough to get into that space, and their light reflects off the white ceiling to spread throughout the kitchen, depending on your wall cabinets arrangement. They’ll give your kitchen a warm, welcoming glow, making it a place your family wants to be for meals.

Final Thought

Lighting provides illumination, not for tasks alone but also to set the mood. The indirect lighting ideas in this piece will aid you in setting the right mood in different parts of your home – the living room, bedroom, and kitchen.