Interior Lighting Design For Your Remote Home Office Workspace

Interior lighting design should always provide enough illumination to facilitate a room’s functionality and improve its aesthetic appeal. When you’re working from home and have transformed a spare room into your remote work office, it’s essential to have adequate lighting that will render effective light without adding wearing out your eyes.

The Impact of Interior Lighting Design on Productivity

Remote work has grown over the past few years, but since last year, the pandemic has created a remote workforce like never before. Many companies have adapted and are seeing the benefits of having employees work from home. According to Forbes, many businesses and executives plan to make remote work a permanent situation.

 

More and more homeowners are transforming spare rooms into their remote workspaces. Often these rooms were formerly used as bedrooms, and there’s commonly just a ceiling fixture and maybe a lamp. While this may have sufficed at the time, it’s likely not a good interior lighting solution for an office where you want to be productive for eight hours a day.

 

Insufficient lighting will steal your energy and make you less productive, hampering your ability to work as effectively as you would like. And, if you’re looking at a computer screen all day, you’re likely to end up with headaches from straining your eyes too much.

 

A better solution would be to upgrade with interior lighting that works better when you’re at the computer screen all day. Illuminating your workspace is a must if you’re a remote worker, but here are some points you should consider.

Location is everything in a home office.

You’ll undoubtedly want to avoid light coming from behind you, which would create unwanted glare on your laptop or computer monitor. Lamps set up in the wrong places can also cause shadows.

 

Also, be aware of light coming from windows when setting up your desk and workstation. Consider which hand you might use if you’re taking written notes and where you’ll be viewing your computer screen.

 

You’ll want to place your desk or workstation facing a northern or southern wall so that shadows do not invade it during the daytime.  Placing your desk with a window to your side could provide ample light that is also the natural light that many workers prefer. Natural light is also known to boost productivity.

Lighting should be from an indirect source.

Direct overhead lights aren’t optimal and will create glare. Have an ambient source of light that will be ultimately responsible for illuminating your remote office, and make sure it spreads over a large part of your workspace and the room instead of concentrating it over your workspace alone.

 

Choose lampshades that will soften the light and scatter it where you need task lighting. You can also have a floor lamp that points up towards the ceiling and bounces indirect light off the walls.

 

The key is to light up the home office room without creating glare and shadows. LED lighting with a color temperature in the 4,000 to 6,000 Kelvin range is best.

Accent lighting is great to perk up your spirits when working remotely.

Sitting at the desk all day can most certainly dampen your spirit and break your focus.

 

While you want ambient and task lighting as part of your interior lighting design, accent lighting for decorative purposes is excellent to stimulate your senses.

 

You can perhaps add cabinet lighting to cabinets or bookcases or a pair of Mid-Century Modern wall sconces. Visual elements can help add personality to your workspace and make it a more happy place to be.

The Takeaway

Interior lighting design is more than an afterthought when it comes to your remote workspace and home office. After all, you want to be more productive than ever and make it work for you.

 

There are many distractions as it is when working from home. You want a lighting solution that helps put the spotlight, so to speak, on your work. Indirect lighting is great, and a little task and accent lighting can’t hurt either.

 

Sometimes it helps to get a little assistance from an experienced lighting designer to help you create the perfect remote office space.

 

Contact the lighting professionals at Illuminations Lighting Design in Houston, and let us help you transform your home office into an ideal workspace.