There’s nothing like that stretch between the end of daylight saving time and the beginning of the Christmas lights season to bring a homeowner to look around one evening after dinner and ask a pressing question.

“Boy, when did it get so darn dark in here?”

If it seems as if your house, so sunny and bright all summer, has suddenly turned into a cave, it’s probably not your imagination, Fort Wayne-area lighting designers say.

Low-light causes

This time of year’s lower sun angle, shorter daylight hours and cloudier weather might all be reasons that a house looks light-starved, they say. But they’re not the only reasons to take a look at updating a home’s interior lighting.

“One of the biggest mistakes homeowners make when they’re building a new house is they don’t put enough light in a home,” says Laura Detrick, lighting designer with Wabash Electric Supply in Fort Wayne.

“They tend to look at lighting last – after the tile, after the carpet, after the kitchen cabinets, and by the time they get to it, their budget is pretty well drained. So a lot of homes, particularly older homes, but even newer homes, don’t have enough.”

Designers say new-home design is also a culprit. Those wide-open great rooms with their high ceilings and big windows are lovely in the daytime. But when it gets dark earlier at night, it can seem as if a house is swallowing light bulbs whole.

You need to compensate by thinking bigger and brighter, says Roberta Stone, a Rome City interior designer who owns R.A. Stone Designs.

With a high ceiling, “Your light source is so far away,” she says. “If you have the same bulb at ground level 8 feet away and then you take it up to 10 feet or 12 feet or more, it’s going to dissipate the light.”

Yet a third reason for a house feeling none too bright is the recent push to switch from incandescent bulbs to more Earth-friendly compact fluorescents, or CFLs. CFL bulbs do use less energy and last longer, but the quality of light is different, lighting experts say.

Toni Carr, sales manager for lighting at Trinity Home Design in New Haven, says many people don’t realize that CFLs come in two varieties with vastly different qualities.

So-called “daylight” bulbs, rated at 5,000 Kelvin, “give you that bright blue look,” Carr says. Color-corrected bulbs, at 2,700 to 3,000 Kelvin, are closer to incandescent, she says.

“What people want is that brightness, but when they get daylight bulbs, it can be very uncomfortable,” she says. For some uses, for example in a dining room where dim lighting seems more formal and intimate or in a bathroom where women put on makeup, daylight bulbs can be unsatisfactory.

At the same time, color-corrected bulbs only approximate the wattages of incandescent, and often do so on the low side, she says. So extra lights, or upping the wattage when fixtures allow it, might be in order.

It might take some experimenting with different kinds of CFLs or a mix of CFLs and incandescents to get the light right, says Stone, who adds that homeowners sometimes get confused about how much light CFLs emit because they take a few moments to warm up to full strength.

3 kinds of lighting

Because lighting can affect not only the visual comfort of a home but also its resale value, big project mistakes can be costly, Detrick says. That’s why she recommends a lighting assessment similar to what is sometimes done by builders on new construction.

“The homeowner brings in blueprints and we help them pick out fixtures based on size and how the area will be used,” she says. “With an existing home, then we suggest the homeowner bring in a schematic of some sort so we can look at room size, placement of windows, fireplace and existing lighting.”

With bigger projects, the lighting trend is toward layering, designers say.

But they’re not talking about adding long underwear to a shirt, sweater and overcoat.

Stone says there are three types of lighting to consider for every room – ambient or overall lighting, accent lighting and task-specific lighting. Mixing the three kinds to get the best effect is a preferred solution to a dark house.

In a family room, for example, ambient light might come from ceiling fixtures, she says. Accent lighting could come from LED lights mounted under bookcase shelves to show off collectibles or art. Task lighting could come from a swing-arm floor lamp fitted with a three-way bulb next to a sofa or chair for reading.

Last week, Jhonelle Kees, a designer of Quality Crafted Homes in Fort Wayne, was figuring out how to apply that concept in a new model home during a lighting assessment meeting at Wabash Electric.

The home has a cathedral ceiling in the great room that extends into the kitchen, “so it’s a little more difficult” to plan lighting, she says. She ultimately settled on angled recessed lighting to accent a fireplace and a large chandelier for the great room for overall lighting.

For the kitchen, she chose can lighting next to the two walls with cabinets, under-cabinet lighting, rope lighting on top of the cabinets and probably three hanging pendant lights over an 8-by-12-foot island to both accent it and assist with tasks such as preparing food or doing homework.

“It’s going to be very well lit because it’s easy to underlight a kitchen,” she said.

Fresh coat of paint

Carr adds that sometimes improving the lighting in a home doesn’t involve fixtures or bulbs at all. Paint can make a big difference, she says.

Dark wall colors may be a popular decorating touch right now, she notes, but they absorb light. That’s especially true if the dark color is on a ceiling.

“A lot of people don’t realize that the white ceiling serves a purpose. It reflects light back into the room,” she says.

But shedding more light at your house might be as easy as adding a lamp, switching a bulb size or changing a lampshade – especially if the shade is opaque or dark in color, Carr says. Changing a shade to a light color or a more translucent material can transform a lamp’s light from negligible to something that enlightens more of a room.

“Black lampshades can look really cool, and that’s OK maybe for a desk where you want the light focused down on one spot,” she says. “But don’t buy a lamp with a shade just because it goes with the décor. You need it to be functional.”

rsalter@jg.net