Accent Lighting Is All about Form and Function

This is the third and last installment of our current blog series on lighting design and automation. Last month, we discussed how lighting designers take a layered approach to illuminating a space. The three lighting layers are ambient, task, and accent lighting. When all three are done correctly, it’s almost magical – lighting can transform any room in your Salt Lake City, UT home from mundane to magnificent. 

In this post, we want to focus on perhaps the lighting that's the most fun – accent lighting. As you can guess, accent lighting is what casts a spotlight (not literally, but sometimes) on something you want to highlight or enhance. What makes today’s accent lighting even more fun is LED technology, which enables unique lighting that fits into more spaces than ever and brings dynamic color control. Ready to see what you can do with accent lighting? Please read on. 

SEE ALSO: How Lighting Control and the Right Ambient Lighting Elevate Your Home

Strip and Linear Lighting

LED technology allows for shaping lights in more and different ways than ever before. They can be straight, slim lights, curved, and wrapped around things. For something common like kitchen under counter lights, LED strips can replace halogen fixtures. They take up less space, generate less heat, and can be easily dimmed. 

But that’s a fairly standard use case. How about making your bar shelves with a mirrored back seem to float? Or highlighting steps into your game room? How about highlighting the beautiful stone of your fireplace wall with a horizontal light across the top? All this is possible with slim LED lighting. 

LED lighting has one more trick up its sleeve – color. Many LED strip lights can dynamically change color. So you can use cooler or warmer white color temperature for the light, or jazz it up with color for entertaining or simply setting a different mood. When you pair these lights up with lighting control, just a button tap to transform your space from bright and cheery to warm and romantic – or whatever ambiance you want to create. 

Tunable Lighting and Color

A wide range of options exists for adding dynamically tunable lighting to your home. At the high end is Lutron Ketra, a system with a variety of fixtures that can change white light color temperature throughout the day. Ketra accent lighting also features some of the highest color rendering indexes (CRI) in the industry, allowing you to feature your decor and finishes in a way you might not have imagined. Ketra accent lights can show off artwork and bring out colors to see different aspects of the color and texture. No wonder this lighting is used in many museums so visitors can see art the way the artist envisioned it. 

Other LED options, like those from Proluxe, offer innovative lights for various accent duties. Tape and linear lighting with color-changing capabilities can be used to enhance architectural features, backlight a flat panel TV, and more. The ability of these lights to curve enables a whole new range of creative possibilities. Other lights like the Proluxe Edgelink tunable can serve as both task and accent lighting; a wide white light color temperature range for lighting up an area and color for artistic accent purposes. 

At Show & Tell AV solutions, we provide cutting-edge technology solutions that enhance our clients’ everyday lives. If you want to learn more about today’s exciting lighting solutions, contact Show & Tell AV Solutions today!