Get Your Free Vitamin D: 4 Ways to Bring Light Into Your Home

Short winter days can make getting enough light into your home especially difficult, so don’t let poor home lighting design keep you from enjoying hours of sunlight. Read on for a few bright ideas on how to lighten up your living spaces and let in the sun.

Double the Light with Mirrors

To create the illusion of more space and to reflect more light around your room, consider placing mirrors opposite your windows—reflective surfaces will amplify the sunlight already entering through the window. Other reflective surfaces such as chrome, glass, and mirrored furniture can help achieve this effect as well.

Lighten Up Your Surfaces

Lighter colors make a room seem wider and airier, so think about painting your walls in shades such as whites or light blues, grays, and tans. Furniture that follows similar palettes will help make your room seem brighter as well. Additionally, painting your ceiling a slightly lighter shade than the rest of your walls can help the room feel more open.

Don’t Keep Out the Sun

Curtains made of lightweight fabrics, such as linen and sheer draperies, work well to allow natural lighting to enter your home, while heavier fabrics, such as velvet, block out the light. Venetian blinds can also help you control the amount of light coming through your windows; they can be angled to block out light, filter it, or let it in unhindered. Keep in mind, also, that different window treatments affect the amount of light allowed through the window, so your glass treatment could be keeping out more sunlight than you’d like.

Give the Light a Way In

More glass means more places for light to come in, so if you’re looking to update your home in order to make it brighter or less closed off, consider adding more windows, expanding your existing windows, or adding a pair of French doors between rooms instead of a solid wall. An open-concept home will naturally allow more light into more areas of your home, but be careful: the areas not reached by natural light will seem disproportionately dark compared to the lighter areas. To combat the disparity, you can use artificial lighting to supplement the naturally lit areas of an open-concept living space.

Using the right colors, adding reflective elements to your decoration, and removing obstructive drapes or structures can go a long way toward making your home a lighter place. Don’t underestimate the sun’s power to brighten your spaces and lift your spirits.