When you think about home upgrades, you usually picture changing the furniture, splashing new paint on the walls, things like that. And that’s all true and fine, but the fact remains that none of these upgrades can change a place as much as natural light can.
Natural light changes color throughout the day from cold to warm back to cold with different intensity levels based on many different factors. One color can easily take on dozens of different shades, solely depending on how natural light hits it. With all these changes, a room can feel more open, warm, and more alive. With furniture, you’ll get that interest and wow effect. But that’s pretty much it.
If you want to incorporate natural light into the design of your home, you have to think long-term from the get-go.
In this article, we’ll go over how you can use natural light to your advantage to make a dream home.
How Natural Light Impacts a Room?
Lots of studies have confirmed how natural light positively affects your mood, plus it helps your body regulate its internal clock, which is important for sleep patterns and dictates how much rest you’re going to get.
But besides the benefits that your body has from it, natural light also dictates how you perceive the size (and comfort) of a room. For instance, a room that has lots of daylight will feel more airy/open.
If the room lacks light and has lots of dark/shadowy corners, the whole room will feel more cramped and uncomfortable.
If you don’t like bugs (e.g., spiders), then keep in mind that spiders usually go for dark corners. If you don’t have dark corners, then there’s less of a chance that the room will contain spiders (or other nasties).
There’s also a practical, money-saving side to natural light. When your home is designed to make the most out of daylight, you don’t need to use artificial lighting all the time, which reduces the amount of electricity you use. With LEDs costing a fraction of what incandescent bulbs cost, this mightn’t end up saving you too much, but it still is worth something, especially if you have lots of ambient lighting or you have a humongous property.
Why Natural Light Gets Ignored?
Natural light often gets the short end of the stick because it’s treated like an optional extra in home design. It’s easier to get excited about new cabinets or a bold accent wall than to think about how sunlight will move through a room.
To add more to this, most people presume that ‘adding more light’ automatically means a major renovation. Meaning, walls getting knocked down, installing huge windows, spending a fortune – the whole nine yards.
And naturally, people avoid that whole idea once they think it through.
The same story applies to both builders and designers. And what ends up happening is that they lean on artificial lighting. It’s more predictable, and it’s easier to plan around.
And this way, what you get is a space that’s nice (on paper), but it gets quickly boring after the novelty factor wears off because they’ve seen it all a million times on Pinterest and other social media. Artificial light, even those warmer types (3000-3500 Kelvin), still don’t add that natural light warmth, the depth, and ‘life’ that comes from natural light. It’s hard to replicate. This oversight mostly happens early in the design process, when people make decisions about layouts and where to place the windows.
By the time the lack of light becomes something everybody notices, it’s either too late or too expensive (or both) to fix.
This is why you want to make sure you’re working with a trusted timber frame supplier from the start. They can check that the framing is designed to keep structural integrity while allowing the light to flow freely.
Designing With ‘Daylight’ in Mind
A bright space with plenty of light is something all buyers love, and it’s something that increases resale value on its own. It also helps prevent problems like mold growth because sunlight reduces damp, dark areas and improves air quality if you have good ventilation.
On a personal level, homes full of natural light can be very beneficial for mental health and overall more pleasant for everyone who lives there. Another advantage people never seem to remember is how well spaces with a lot of natural light age. Rooms that need too much artificial lighting can feel dated and worn pretty quickly, which isn’t the case for rooms that are naturally bright.
When you think about all this and incorporate it into the design from the very start, you get a home that’s easier to maintain and just as inviting decades after you’ve moved in.
Conclusion
Natural light is something nobody thinks about until they find themselves living in a drab, depressing space where they need to turn the lights on at 9 AM. But that’s what happens when you obsess over finding the perfect greige shade for your couch that will go perfectly with the rest of your gray/white/taupe millennial decor.
Consider this article a gentle little nudge to reconsider your priorities and chase the sun instead of furniture.
