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Creating the Blueprint for the Perfect Lighting Plan

So you're building your dream retirement or second home in Park City, nestled amidst the serenity of the Wasatch Mountains, reflecting your unique style and preferences. While you've meticulously chosen the design, materials, colors, and finishes, one element can elevate your home's ambiance to another level: lighting. 

Recessed lighting, in particular, isn't just a functional necessity; it's an art, a statement, and a mood-setter. And it's not something you should leave to a standard lighting plan. You can fully customize this critical aspect of your dream home, but you have to plan ahead—ideally, as you finalize your architectural plans. Here's why you should call a recessed lighting installation expert early on your new home journey.

Replace the Inexpensive Cans with Efficient and Flexible LED Downlights

Older homes in Salt Lake City certainly have their charms. They often have features and touches you can't find in modern designs and constructions. One area that may lack that charm, however, is the lighting. Depending on the age of the home, if it has ceiling downlighting, it's likely to be of the inexpensive "can" variety that you can find at any Utah Home Depot. Even newer homes in just the past ten years often have this lighting, often coupled with somewhat efficient but maddening CFL bulbs. 

However, there is an easy way to replace this older lighting with higher performance, efficient, and long-lasting LED lighting upgrades. Read on below to learn more!

Lutron Wireless Lighting Control Solutions Simplify Retrofits

Lighting control is one of the most popular smart home technologies, and for good reason. Most people can instantly grasp the convenience of lights that manage themselves for efficiency and the simplicity of managing many lights with one touch of a button. That, of course, is just the start. But talking about lighting might conjure visions of electricians needing to rewire all your lights and switches to gain the benefits in your Salt Lake City, UT, home. 

While there are centralized lighting solutions you can install when building new or doing extensive remodeling, sophisticated lighting control is also easily attainable for existing homes. Thanks to Lutron wireless solutions like HomeWorks Wireless, retrofitting all goodness of smart lighting into your home is painless. Read more about it below!

Lutron’s RadioRA 3 Is a Big Step Forward in Lighting Control

Lutron is a world leader in lighting control solutions and an acknowledged innovator in lighting. Unlike in other industries, professional lighting control solutions aren't fully revamped every year. Indeed, the predecessor to Lutron RadioRA 3, RadioRA 2, was around for over a decade and was the go-to home lighting control solution for professional integrators for many years. 

RadioRA 2 was a rock-solid solution designed to be easy to integrate as a retrofit into existing homes with minimal rewiring. In upgrading to RadioRA 3, Lutron doubled down on ease of installation, made it even more scalable, and added improved, modern software integration to play even better with the best home automation platforms. Read on to learn more about one of the best and most flexible lighting solutions for your Park City, UT, home. 

Lighting is Fundamental for a Better Life

Do you think about the lighting in your home? Frankly, most people don't. Yet lighting can be as important as interior design, colors, furniture, and accessories. Light shapes the way you see and experience your surroundings. Unfortunately, even in high-end properties, often little attention is paid to lighting design. The same tired lighting techniques provide the right amount of light, but they miss out on the details that create atmosphere, ambiance, and a differentiated experience. 

Fortunately, that’s changing. One change is that new lighting form factors based on LED technology present new options that were previously unavailable or incredibly expensive to create with older technology. The other is a different approach to lighting design. 

Show and Tell AV has partnered with innovative companies such as Light Can Help You to make advanced lighting design faster and more accessible. Learn how better lighting design can help you experience your Salt Lake City, UT, home in a new way. 

Innovating Lighting Design Can Elevate Your Home Cinema

Creating a comfortable and immersive home theater experience takes more than just a big screen and powerful surround sound system. Lighting design plays a crucial role in setting the mood and enhancing the cinematic experience. In Salt Lake City, Utah, where the beautiful mountain landscapes and starry skies are a constant source of inspiration, incorporating creative lighting details in your home theater can take your movie nights to the next level.

Thanks to newer lighting technology like fiber optics and LED, the options for home theater lighting have never been better. Explore four options below for injecting more atmosphere into your home cinema.

Discover the Power and Versatility of DMF DRD Series Lighting

DMF lighting is well known for its modular LED lighting systems. What's the big deal about modular lighting? It simplifies installation and provides great flexibility for homeowners to customize the lighting design in their homes. With the new, award-winning DRD Series, DMF continues to push the envelope in the ways you can use this lighting. 

Of course, any sophisticated Salt lake City residence should be outfitted with home lighting control, which not only makes it easy to manage many lights but also allows you to set the perfect atmosphere and ambiance with light. Is DMF’s DRD Series the right system for your Utah home? Keep reading to learn more!

Get Creative with Home Lighting with Modern LED Fixtures

Home lighting is undergoing a quiet revolution. LED technology is thoroughly transforming the lighting world, being capable of so much more than what came before it. It can dynamically change white color temperature, display a rainbow of colors, and be shaped into lighting forms that were impossible before. 

Aside from the aesthetic possibilities, LED lighting lasts decades, is up to 80% more energy efficient, and generates little heat, one huge reason why it’s so wonderfully adaptable to many form factors. Keep reading to learn more about accenting your Park City, UT, home with linear and color LED lighting.

Modular LED Lighting and Lighting Control Elevates Your Home’s Appeal

Unless you built a totally custom home, chances are the house has a "standard" lighting package. What does that mean? Even in high-end homes, some builders don't invest in upper-end lighting. You might have plenty of cans for ambient overhead lighting, but the quality of those lights might not be the best. This is especially true if your home is equipped with compact fluorescent lighting, some of which isn't even dimmable!

But there are plenty of solutions to transform your Salt Lake City home’s lighting. And it doesn’t require a wholesale redo of your existing infrastructure. LED lighting and lighting control can be retrofitted into your current home, adding customizability and control over your illumination like never before. Keep reading below to learn more about seeing your Utah home in a whole new light!

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. 

Task Lighting is all about Form and Function

Lighting designers like to talk about layered lighting. What is it? Layered lighting is an approach that adds just the right amount of illumination to a space in your Park City, UT home, both for functional and aesthetic purposes. The three layers of lighting are ambient, task, and accent. 

Last month in this lighting series, we discussed ambient lighting. Ambient is the general lighting for a room, most often done with overhead lights like recessed cans. Task lighting is the light that focuses on an area to get work done, like a lamp on a home office desk or the pendants over the kitchen island. Finally, accent lighting is the light that highlights an object or area, such as shining a spot on artwork or light that highlights an arch. In this blog, stay with us below as we focus on task lights and lighting automation. Look for more on accent lighting in the next blog!

Ambient Lighting is the First Step in Home Illumination

Lighting is essential for function and utility in your home. But badly designed lighting will detract, while well-designed lighting can make even a mundane home dramatic. Your Park City, UT home is anything but ordinary, so imagine what it would look like with a great lighting plan. 

This month, we'll focus our blogs on how you can improve your home with the power of light. From good lighting design to home lighting control, the right light, properly applied and managed, can transform the way you live and enjoy your spaces. In the first of this three-part series, we'll discuss the latest options for ambient lighting, the first leg of the lighting design tripod. Ready to learn more? Please keep reading below!

Illuminate, Showcase, and Highlight with Intelligently Designed Lighting

Ambient, task, and accent lighting are the three main types that come together to illuminate your beautiful Park City-area home. If you’re missing one, you may find yourself squinting unnecessarily at your TV screen due to glare, or maybe you have to bring your book closer to your face because the lights are too dim. Lighting serves an inherently functional purpose, but it can also add to the style of your Utah property! Keep reading to learn a few different fixtures you can incorporate into your home lighting control system. 

Learn 3 of our ideas for using color-changing lights to infuse your days with fun

Enough articles about how lighting control is “convenient” and “energy-efficient” and “practical” — let’s talk about how much FUN lighting control can be. One of our favorite smart trends is using RGB lighting to bring a splash of color and unique customization to homes of all shapes and sizes. RGB LEDs combine red, blue, and green in one module to create and generate over 16 million hues of light. 

When you integrate RGB lights into a home lighting control system, you suddenly have an entire color palette at your fingertips. With the press of a button on your smartphone, you can send vibrant colors to bathe every room in your home. Sound fun? Read on below to learn three ways to use color-changing lights to brighten up your day-to-day at home!

In our last blog, we introduced Lutron, the pioneer of lighting control systems. Now part of the Lutron portfolio is Ketra, a leader in tunable LED solutions that bring lighting personalization to the home. Below, learn how to transform your home with Ketra tunable LEDs + Lutron lighting control.

1. Blur the Boundaries Between Indoors and Outdoors

Enjoy the perfect light at any time with dynamic LEDs that simulate daylight. Remember the evolving hues and intensity of the sun that we described earlier? Ketra tunable light fixtures can bring that same experience into the home by mimicking the color temperature and brightness of natural light from morning to night. You’ll feel more connected to nature, more focused during the day, and more relaxed at night—even if you forget to step outside into the natural light of Bountiful, UT at all.

2. Set the Scene for Cocktail Hour

When you envision an evening at your favorite cocktail bar, what does the lighting look like? It’s probably low and warm to help create a comfortable and intimate atmosphere. With Ketra lighting at home, you can recreate the same ambiance with ease. Keep kitchen and dining room lights bright and at a warm-white temperature as you prepare for cocktail hour. Then as guests arrive, dim and warm your lights to set the mood for a cozy evening with friends.

3. Become a Master Entertainer with Striking Colors

Ketra gifts you with a full spectrum of whites and colors from a single light source—17 million shades, to be exact. When it comes to experimenting with light colors, the sky is the limit! Create personalized color palettes for holiday gatherings, game-watching events, weekend parties, and other occasions. Find your favorite shades in a sea of saturated colors and pastels, which never degrade over time, thanks to Ketra’s Color Lock technology.

4. Dial in the Perfect Light with Speed and Precision

Ketra paired with a Lutron HomeWorks control system puts even more power and personalization at your fingertips. Create custom light scenes for entertaining, working, dining, and more, and activate them instantly from a customized wall keypad. When you want to tweak the color or intensity of one or several light fixtures, you can quickly make adjustments using the Lutron Connect app.

Using Smart Lighting to Enhance Every Activity at Home

This post is the final chapter of this month’s blog series on lighting control and automation. So far, we’ve covered system choices in automated lighting and the many versatile (and fun) ways to control your lights. In this post, we’ll take lighting automation to the next level – how to customize your lighting to enhance just about everything you do at home.  

A good lighting control system is much more than turning lights on and off with a smartphone or voice control. While all that's convenient, it's when your lights can set just the right scene for what you want to do that you start leveraging the power of home lighting automation. And beyond the light, it’s how your lighting works with the rest of your smart home to keep you comfortable and safe.

Ready to learn more? Let Show & Tell AV, your local Control4 dealer and home technology expert in Salt Lake City, be your guide to the benefits of smart lighting control. 

Control4 and Lutron Offer Easy, Versatile Approaches for Commanding Your Lights

In our last blog, we introduced the benefits of smart lighting control and discussed the different types of lighting system designs that our teaminstalls for homes of all ages and sizes in the Salt Lake City area. In this blog, we’re diving into the fun stuff: controlling your lights! 

Lighting control systems from leading manufacturers like Control4 and Lutron are truly designed with you in mind. They offer various control options that fit different situations and preferences so that managing your home lighting is always convenient and intuitive. For example, a mobile app may be ideal when you’re in the backyard, while voice control may be best when you’re cooking dinner.

Keep reading to learn four convenient ways you can control your Control4 or Lutron lighting system.

Let Us Help You Design the Right Lighting System for Your Needs

Without surprise, lighting control is one of the first solutions many homeowners invest in when outfitting their property with smart technology. Smart lighting systems offer convenient and intuitive control of all your lights through personalized keypads, a mobile app, and even voice control. In return, you receive improved home security, reduced energy usage, and more time in your day.

Our team installs entirely modular lighting control systems that are perfect for homes old, new, big, and small. Whether you want to start in a few rooms and expand later or invest in a large-scale lighting control installation for a new build, you’ll receive a premium lighting control experience with our help.

If you’re considering home lighting automation, read below to learn about the different types of lighting system designs that we offer and which may be the right method for your needs and budget.

Make Managing Lights a Snap with Automated Lighting Control

Lighting control is one of the most sought-after smart home features, and the benefits are easy to understand. Lighting control can save energy, add convenience, and increase your home's safety. Lighting control systems also add the flexibility to fine-tune one light or many in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most powerful feature of smart lighting is the ability to create a scene. A scene is a way to program several light fixtures – or several rooms of them – to specific settings at the same time. You can then set the scene with the touch of a button, a tap on a smartphone app, or even using a voice command. Sounds simple, right? Let’s explore some innovative ways of using lighting automation in your Park City mountain home.

It’s Time to See Your Home in a Different Light

Do you pay much attention to your home's lighting? Most people don't, other than to have enough of it. Yet lighting can significantly affect our energy levels and mood, except you might not know it until you experience it. Like a thoughtfully lit restaurant can create the ambiance for a leisurely and romantic dinner, your home's lighting can set the stage for everything you do.

Fortunately, lighting has come a long way down the innovation path in the past few years. Two advances have led the way – LED and smart home automation. Combining this dynamic duo of technologies has enabled more creative approaches to smart lighting control in homes in Salt Lake City and the surrounding areas.