Switched on: How to create dreamy bedroom lighting

Bedside lighting creates the ambience for rest and intimate encounters. Here's the lowdown on layering, symmetry and styling 

Vico Megistretti's Nesso (mushroom lamp) c.1960 in orange, red or white. Injection-moulded polycarbonate, 32cm from €172, Lamp Twist.

Bedside lighting guides the first and last moments of your day, especially as the hours of natural light grow shorter. It creates an atmosphere for restful sleep, relaxation, and intimate encounters. It also offers a key aesthetic detail, enhancing the overall function, layering, symmetry and styling of the room. 

Having just redesigned a small master for a newly married couple, we were drawn into a journey to find just the right set of bedside tables and lamps to match their highly specific vision for task and ambient lighting. Illuminated, I changed my lighting to a softer wash in the specific zone of our bed. 

Scale and balance

There are so many compositions of lighting from the twiggy to the voluptuous, but it’s hard to argue against this calming use of symmetry and proportion. Scale your table and lighting to the height of the ceiling, and the size and styling of the headboard. Ensure you know the final height of the mattress top too. 

If you can level the table to the mattress height? Ideal. How high is the lamp and the table combined? Bedside tables are not standard, with a wide choice in surfacing size and heights from 35cm to 80cm. Getting too high or too low a table is a common oversight — 55cm to 75cm widths are generous enough for most of us to stage a mighty lamp, a glass and a book; otherwise, take the lamp up the wall or suspend it.

Double hanging Hanna pendants make good use of a smaller bedroom, where table lamps would intrude on surface room. Aluminium, brass and glass, €509 in black or white, Delightfull.

Aesthetically, tall stems to the lamp base can create vertical push, lifting a low ceiling (the headboard design can row in too). Smaller compact lights can huddle closer to the bedside locker, directing a soft cloud of light down to the table in a gentle glow. Small bedrooms where floor space is at a premium can benefit from floating shelf-style bedside surfaces or clever, colourful shadow boxes (Ikea Stomso, €27). These can be accessorised with small lamps, posable wall lights, or low-hanging pendants flanking the bed at least 150cm off the floor.

Bright buys:  The Pleg wall light designed by Yonoh Estudio Creativo looks like a folded piece of paper — position in four ways, €307.50. The Edward wall (switched) by Astro, from €252, choice of shades, both at willieduggan.com.

Operation

How would you like to switch on your lighting when entering the room or thrashing an arm from a prone position in bed? Pushed forward by the headboard and pillows, most bedside lights are physically too far back towards the wall, making for repetitive strain when reaching to manually operate them. 

The light switch could be mounted on the lamp base. It could be the lamp base and shade (with a touch operation). It could be mounted on the flex, a wall or surface switch, dangling as a small chain, or voice-activated.

If there’s any place for a smart light, bulb or plug to shine — it’s entering a darkened bedroom where you can demurely perk it with a whisper or clap. Dimming features, or variable tones and temperatures of light — very helpful. Even if you hang two lights directly from the ceiling as bedside servants — how am I turning these on?

In a child’s rooms a night-light function or even a sunrise alarm in economical LED can be very welcome, but we want it easily to hand.

Bright buys: Vico Megistretti’s Nessino (mushroom lamp) c.1960 in orange, red or white. Injection-moulded polycarbonate, 32cm from €172, lamptwist.com. Try smart lighting with hub operation or remote control. Tradfri by Ikea, LED bulb E27 806 lumen, smart wireless dimmable/colour and white spectrum globe, €12; choice of shades with a Wi-fi speaker lamp base with voice assist, €199. Free Sonas app, ikea.com/ie.

Form and function 

It’s so easy to be carried away by the variety of handsome styling of beside and surrounding wall lighting, forgetting eye comfort. Industrial lamp-like bulbs behind clear glazing? Dazzling at close quarters even with low-LED lumen. 

Glare is not relaxing or flattering so think about where any direct light will fall when you’re in bed. 

Tom Dixon's Beat wall light in cast iron, spun brass and copper, €439, Ambien Direct. 

Pale diffuse materials and obscuring glass will soften and distil light. Obscuring materials (including lined drum shades and metal housings) will block it, focusing rays up or down.

Directional light doesn’t have to be an overbearing searchlight. If you’re not a traditional reader and use a back-lit Kindle, there’s no need for directional light to navigate physical pages. 

Some bedside lighting includes discreet USB ports to charge your phone while you sleep. Lindy Floren flexible reading light in brushed gold, €70, various suppliers.

Swing arms mounted to the headboard, wall or working from a stable table-mounted lamp are highly versatile (favoured by hotels who wire switches directly into the headboard).

Look into flexible goose-neck reading lights of two watts, with small lens designs, and touch dimmers up to 300K-6000K (kelvin) as individual readers. These are sometimes integrated into master lamps. If you love Anglepoise lamps, choose one that together with posturing over your work or book, can swoop down to gently scatter light off the bedside surfaces. 

Downlighters and up-lighters held close to the wall can create dramatically patterned plumes, but together with a heavy headboard, they can throw shadows right at the pillow position. Adjustable sconces with direction heads might be better. Ensure your table lamp is heavy enough not to fall when rudely bumped.

Bright buys: Artemide Tolomeo mini, articulated wall lamps from €244, nordicnest.com; unusual gold-finished microphone-style LED wall hangers with flexible reading light (223881893), €124, Litfad.com.

Lamps as accessories 

The style, colour and character of your lighting will alter when on and off. With a pattern of light set close to the wall, it occupies more scale than its actual size. Otherwise, the material, size, shape, colour, volumes and adjacent wall colour, will all influence how appealing and present the piece is. 

Think about your lamps as a sculpture married to the table — as decorative pieces on a pedestal. A colourful base as weighty as a watermelon, or a fabulous material to a shade can bring your lighting up to the level of a true statement. If the lights go up the walls and the wiring is not chased into the plaster, will visible wires annoy you?

In terms of colours, choosing a tonal scheme throughout the room, the lamp can recede within that palette, or you could use it as a bold accent in colour, texture or metal. After a mid-century vibe? We are spoiled, with posable lamps for retro inclined bedside tables and walls. 

If you prefer a more classic contemporary — drum shades, and softly organic abstracts in panels, facets and curves will be a turn-on. Glass bases offer less visual heft than a typical ceramic. Their jewel-like quality on beaded and stacked stems and in full, blown or moulded single-piece supports, offers seductive flash. Experiment with positioning modestly sized artwork over your table lamps. Deftly curated, the relationship, especially by day, can shine.

Bright buys: The Magic Bird collection — a collaboration between bird master Oiva Toika for Littala Palturi in the Magis Linnut collection;  polycarbonate bodies, from €348, finnishdesignshop.com; dome lamp by Helen James for Dunnes Stores, €50 (a brilliant bargain). Compare this to the Colby rechargable in a similar design at M&S, €55. Fugia Brick-Red jute lamp on iron frame, €99, ezliving-interiors.ie.