Practical guides and ideas on architectural lighting — from lumen calculations to creating the perfect atmosphere with light.
Dark walls look like velvet on the sample board, then turn grey and gloomy once the downlights go in. Why dark finishes change the lighting maths, and how to light a dark room layer by layer, from wall washing and accent light to glare, sheen, colour and visual contrast.
October 30, 2026
"AI" is now attached to everything from occupancy sensors to image generators. For an architect or designer, the useful question is narrower: which of these tools have been measured against reality, and which are still promises?
October 29, 2026
Older eyes need more light, but they are also more easily dazzled and slower to adjust between rooms. How much light published guidance suggests, and how to detail a home that is bright at the task, calm elsewhere and safe at night.
October 28, 2026
You add another lamp. It does not help. You put in brighter bulbs. Still gloomy. And when you measure the room it turns out to be perfectly well lit on paper. The reason is that you do not see light, you see surfaces, and most lighting is aimed at the one surface nobody looks at.
October 27, 2026
Much of the advice for north-facing rooms is about paint. But what these rooms really miss is the sun: its warmth, its contrast and its sparkle. Lighting can put some of that back, by day as well as after dark.
October 26, 2026
Most cafes are lit for the opening photograph, then struggle at seven in the morning and again at seven at night. This guide shows how to light a cafe for the window, the counter and the clock, with the rules an architect in England should check.
October 25, 2026
Most shop windows are too dim at noon, when they compete with the street, and too bright at midnight, when only the neighbours are looking. Here is how to light the glass, the display and the sign for every hour, with the rules to check in England.
October 24, 2026
In a spa treatment room, the guest spends the hour lying down, looking at the ceiling or the floor. How to light a spa from the treatment bed up, from task light and scenes to dim corridors, wet zones and the rules that still apply.
October 23, 2026
A roof lantern fills a room with daylight, then turns into a black hole after dark. The answer is not to shine light into the glass but to light the lining around it. How to light a roof lantern so it works at night.
October 16, 2026
Most LED datasheets quote a single CRI figure. It is an average of eight test colours, none of them a strong red. What CRI measures, what TM-30 adds, and how to specify colour rendering for materials that matter.
October 15, 2026
Shelf lighting tends to go where it is easiest to hide, at the back or underneath. For books, that is often the wrong place: light from behind turns spines into silhouettes. Where the light sits decides what you see.
October 14, 2026
Japandi is usually described as a look. Its lighting has a deeper history: a Danish paper lampshade inspired by Japanese origami, a Danish designer's lifelong pursuit of glare-free light, and Isamu Noguchi's lanterns of washi and bamboo.
October 12, 2026
.jpg)
The usual advice for pendants over a kitchen island is 75 to 90 cm above the worktop. It is a sound starting point, but one row of lights has three audiences: the cook, the people on the stools and everyone looking across the room.
October 7, 2026
Most guides answer "how high should wall lights be?" with a single number. The better first question is what the light is for, because lighting a face, a wall, a book or a corridor each calls for a different height.
October 2, 2026
A double-height room is two rooms at once: a human-scale room where people live, inside a volume nobody can reach. How to light both, and how to plan for the half that is out of reach.
September 29, 2026
A conservatory has almost nothing to bounce light off: no ceiling, no void for cables, and a roof that turns into an oven on a sunny day. How to light a glass room by finding the few solid surfaces it has.
September 28, 2026
A roof terrace is a garden with no ground to dig, the most weather-exposed spot in the building, and a view worth protecting. Where good lighting starts.
September 22, 2026
A chandelier does more than light a room - it creates a focal point, corrects proportions and connects architecture with furniture below. Here's why scale, material and craftsmanship matter more than style.
September 21, 2026
A complete guide to resolving the core conflict of bar lighting: creating a moody, atmospheric space for guests while providing accurate, code-compliant task lighting for bartenders working just a metre away.
September 18, 2026
.jpg)
Walk through any major gallery and you will notice something odd once you know to look for it. The rooms are dark. Blinds are drawn across skylights on a bright afternoon. A watercolour that was on the wall last spring has gone back into storage. None of that is aesthetic. The collection is on a clock.
September 16, 2026
Most people assume a listing protects the outside of a building. It does not. Unless the list entry says otherwise, the listing covers the entire building, inside and out, which means the downlight you were planning to recess into a plaster ceiling is an alteration to a listed structure.
September 15, 2026
.jpg)
A studio apartment has one room and four jobs. Somebody sleeps there, works there, cooks there and entertains there, and nothing marks the boundaries between those activities. Which means the lighting is doing something it never has to do in a larger home: defining rooms that do not physically exist.
September 14, 2026
.jpg)
It is eleven at night. There are fourteen light sources in the room and about nine switches. Two are by the door, three are behind the bedside table where you cannot see them without sitting up, and one appears to do nothing at all. This is not a rare experience. It is the normal one, and it happens in expensive hotels more often than in cheap ones.
September 10, 2026
.jpg)
Pick up a bottle of good champagne and it will be dark green, almost black. That is not an aesthetic tradition, it is a filter. Light does documented chemical damage to wine, and the damage happens in a narrow band of wavelengths that some light sources emit heavily and others barely touch.
September 9, 2026
Nobody stands in a hallway. That single fact should change how you light one, and it almost never does. A hallway is not a room, it is a transition between rooms, and its job is to move you from one lighting condition to another without your eyes having to fight.
September 7, 2026
The room is finished, the projector cost more than the car, and the blacks look grey. It is usually not the projector. It is either light falling on the screen that should not be there, or a bias light set far too bright because it was set using a rule that stopped being correct decades ago.
September 4, 2026
It is handover day. The joinery is right, the stone is right, and the fixtures are exactly the ones you specified. The client turns the dimmer down and the lights stutter. Nothing in that room is broken. The dimmer and the drivers were built to work in two different ways, and nobody checked whether they would get along.
September 2, 2026
Almost every lighting problem is a design problem, solvable by choosing better or spending more. A sauna is not that. It is a room where ordinary lighting products physically cannot survive, which is why an older technology is still specified seriously in an era when LEDs have replaced almost everything else.
September 1, 2026
A lit pool at night does something no other lighting can. It is also the only lighting job where the fixture lives inside the thing it is lighting, permanently submerged, surrounded by people. That combination makes it the most heavily regulated lighting most designers will ever specify, and the rules look excessive until you know what they are protecting against.
August 31, 2026
There is a moment when LED strip lighting gives itself away. The light looks good, then you glance at the cove and you can see them, a row of individual bright points like a line of tiny headlights, and the whole room quietly drops a price bracket. The difference between strip that reads as architecture and strip that reads as a cheap upgrade comes down to about six decisions, none of which are on the front of the box.
August 28, 2026
You see a painting in a gallery and it holds you. Then you buy something you love, hang it at home, and it just sits there looking like an object. The usual assumption is that the gallery had better art. Often it had better lighting, and specifically it had light arriving from the right place. There is a single angle professional galleries use for this, and everything else follows from it.
August 27, 2026
There is a particular small humiliation that happens around nine in the morning. You step outside and realise the jacket you put on is not the colour you thought it was. The navy is black. You got dressed in a well lit room and still got it wrong. It almost certainly was not carelessness, it was the light, and this one has a specific measurable fix that most closets simply do not have.
August 26, 2026
.jpg)
You know the feeling. Coming down a staircase, thinking about something else, and your foot arrives half a beat early. For a fraction of a second, you could not tell where the step ended. That moment is the entire brief for stair lighting: not making the staircase bright, but making the edge of each step unmistakable.
August 25, 2026
.jpg)
A colleague asks if you are feeling all right. You slept fine. You just look grey on camera and you have no idea why. It is almost never the webcam, it is the window behind you. Ask an ergonomist where to put a desk and they say the window belongs to your side. Ask anyone who works in video and they say it belongs in front of you. Both are right, and your desk has to do both jobs.
August 22, 2026
Most dining room pendants are hung too high, usually by about a hand's width. It sounds trivial. It is not. A practical guide to the one measurement that decides whether a dining room works, how to size the fixture to your table, and the three layers that have to sit around the pendant.
August 20, 2026
A garden at night is not a darker version of the garden at noon. It is a different place entirely. Whatever you light becomes the composition, and everything you leave alone disappears. A guide to the techniques, the technical spine that makes them work outdoors, and what all that light does to the living material you are pointing it at.
August 19, 2026
A building has two designs. One is what the architect drew for daylight. The other only exists after dark, and almost nobody draws it with the same care. A guide to facade lighting: grazing versus washing, mounting distance, lighting glass, and the outdoor rules that turn out to be less about how bright your building is than about how much light is allowed to leave it.
August 18, 2026
Cove lighting is the only lighting technique judged entirely by what you cannot see. It succeeds when the room glows and nobody can locate the source, and fails the instant someone spots the strip. A guide to why the published dimensions contradict each other, the classical detailing principles, strip selection and the coordination problems that catch people out.
August 17, 2026
Lie back in a dental chair and there is nowhere to look but up. For the length of the appointment, the ceiling is the patient's entire visual field. A practical guide to dental practice lighting: the medical device boundary, glare from the supine position, shade matching, and a full design checklist.
August 14, 2026
Every colourist knows the moment. The client loves the colour at the chair, walks out, catches her reflection in a shop window, and the tone is not what she just approved. The hair has not changed. The light has. A practical guide to salon lighting: EU and US standards, CRI and R9, mirror geometry, daylight, and a specification checklist.
August 13, 2026
Supermarket lighting is the only branch of retail design where the specification has a food safety dimension, a shelf life dimension, and increasingly a legal one. A complete guide to lux levels, vertical illuminance on shelving, colour temperature by fresh food department, the R9 problem, and the line between good presentation and deception.
August 11, 2026
Search for recessed lighting spacing and you will find four or five different formulas, all claiming to be the standard. There is a real formula behind all of them. Here is how downlight spacing actually works, and how to lay out a ceiling without guessing.
August 10, 2026
The bathroom is the only room in a house where lighting design and electrical safety are the same conversation. A complete guide to IP zones, why overhead vanity lights cast shadows, correct mirror sconce heights, and the mistakes that ruin bathrooms.
August 6, 2026
The living room is the hardest room in a house to light well, because it has no single job. A complete guide to the four layers, lux levels, lamp heights, TV glare, and the scenes that make a room work at every hour of the evening.
August 4, 2026
A complete guide to lumens vs watts, including a full conversion chart, luminous efficacy explained, how to calculate the lumens a room actually needs, and why wattage equivalence labels are unreliable.
July 31, 2026
A professional specification guide to gym and fitness center lighting design. Learn how to optimize lux levels, CCT, and CRI for every zone of a commercial facility to enhance safety, performance, and member experience.
July 29, 2026
Master the art of modern kitchen lighting. This complete guide reveals how to expertly layer ambient, task, and accent lighting to create a highly functional, luxurious architectural space.
July 28, 2026
.jpg)
A lighting guide to mastering hotel lobby lighting. Learn how to combine ambient, accent, task, and decorative layers to create a calm, considered, and premium first impression for your guests.
July 24, 2026
Discover expert architectural lighting strategies for bakeries. Learn how to choose color temperature, CRI, and accent lighting to boost sales and aesthetics.
July 20, 2026
Discover how circadian lighting, dim-to-warm technology, glare control, and layered illumination can help create healthier residential bedrooms for better sleep.
July 16, 2026
Restaurant lighting design shapes food perception, dwell time, and spend. Learn the CRI, beam angle, and dimming-control principles hospitality designers specify.
July 14, 2026
July 8, 2026
Low ceilings don't have to feel cramped. Four lighting techniques - wall-washing, indirect uplighting, and ultra-shallow fixtures - that make apartments feel taller and more open.
July 7, 2026
Discover how strategic office lighting design boosts employee productivity and wellbeing through five real-world case studies.
July 7, 2026
.jpg)
Discover how luxury brands use architectural retail lighting design to elevate product perception, direct foot traffic, and enhance the customer journey.
July 2, 2026
The Archlior blog is a practical, vendor-neutral resource for anyone specifying or thinking about lighting — covering hospitality settings like hotel lobbies and restaurants, retail and boutique environments, workplace and kitchen lighting, and the technical fundamentals that underpin good design, such as lumen calculations, color temperature, and CRI.
Each guide is written to be immediately useful: practical rules of thumb, real fixture recommendations, and the reasoning behind them, rather than abstract theory. The library continues to grow, including deeper dives into emerging topics like AI-assisted lighting visualization.