The Best Light Fixtures To Sell Your Home

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Why Lighting Is Important When Selling Your Home

Close your eyes and imagine your dream home. Is a bright, airy, fresh interior one of the first features you picture? If so, you are in good company: Both natural and artificial light are consistently reported as important elements for home buyers.

The reasons why are many and include:

• Light can make a room feel bigger and more comfortable.
• Consistent exposure to natural light boosts the production of vitamin D.
• Light is associated with nature and good physical and mental health.
• Good lighting conditions can help with motivation, productivity, and focus. This can be essential, especially for those working or studying at home.

If you are trying to sell your property, you should pay particular attention to how to pick lighting for your home before listing and viewings. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the best home lighting styles and fixtures and the winning ways how to get more light into a room.

Home Lighting Styles (That Sell)

One of the most important things to consider when choosing the right light for your property is combining and adapting different styles for each room. For example, the light that works best in your bathroom will certainly not be suitable for your kitchen, and vice versa.

Let’s look at some of the best home lighting styles you should incorporate into your house to maximize your chances of selling.

Natural Lighting

The first and perhaps the most essential type of light is also the cheapest: natural light. It may feel like an easy and obvious element to add to your home, but natural light often gets neglected in favor of artificial fixtures.

To ensure your home features plenty of natural light, keep your blinds and curtains open, your windows squeaky clean, and consider adding a few indoor plants to create a feeling of naturalness and good health that so many buyers these days are looking for.

Ambient Lighting

This artificial lighting style has a very specific function: Ensuring light gets distributed evenly and adequately across a room. To be effective, ambient lighting should match the room where you choose to install it. 

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For example, adding a massive chandelier to a small bathroom or cove lighting to a kitchen will not work and may achieve the opposite effect. Choosing the perfect type of ambient lighting for each space might feel a bit daunting, but fear not — later on in this guide, we have some easy tips to help you do so effortlessly.

Accent Lighting

Do you want to bring the viewer’s attention to a specific feature of a room or evoke a particular feeling? If so, accent lighting is what you need. With the right type of accent lighting, you can create the atmosphere you want for each room — whether it be a cozy corner of your living room, a relaxing bathroom, or even a sensual bedroom.

Task Lighting

These days, many of us work from home. Ensuring that your property features a small workspace or a dedicated home office can make your sale a real success. Regardless of the space you have available, one thing can truly elevate your home’s workspace: task lighting. 

Think clip lights, floor lamps, and even small ceiling pendants — task lighting, as the name suggests, helps to focus on a specific task, such as reading or writing at a desk, and is, therefore, perfect for any home office setting.

The Best Light Fixtures To Sell a Home

To create the lighting styles we have just discussed, you must use different lighting fixtures for your home. Below we list some of the most popular choices. 

Architectural Sconces

One of the best types of accent lighting is architectural sconces. These wall-mounted lights offer tremendous versatility and can help you achieve many different results based on the specific room where you install them.

You can use sconces as a primary lighting fixture and a secondary light source, replacing traditional tabletop lamps. Sconces allow you to bring attention to specific focal points in a room and draw interesting light patterns on ceilings, walls, and floors.

Chandelier Lighting 

You should consider chandeliers grand, old-fashioned, and over-the-top. Today, chandeliers can fit any style and be placed in most rooms, provided their size allows for one.

Generally speaking, you will want to add chandeliers to larger rooms like living rooms, dining rooms, and entrances, but why not be bolder and install one in your bedroom, too? 

Chandeliers can bring out that quintessential elegance and timeless décor many home buyers love. Not to mention that, as ambient lighting fixtures, they are also great at crafting a particular atmosphere or evoking a specific vibe.

Cove Lighting

Sober, subtle, and often almost out of sight, cove lighting is the perfect way to bring attention to specific details of a room. Cove lighting is a sophisticated choice for accent lighting in many rooms.

Pendant Lighting

As the name suggests, pendant lights are hanging fixtures that can be installed on a ceiling. These can work in a variety of ways but are primarily used to create ambient and accent lighting styles.

Recessed Lighting

This is an elegant and modern way to illuminate a room with small lights installed within wall panels. Recessed lighting works great for ambient lighting but can also be used for accent and task lighting.

Torchieres 

Torchieres are floor lamps that bring the light up toward the ceiling. Using them in pairs is often recommended to maximize their effect, as this helps to balance the room’s light and symmetry better.

Room-by-Room Lighting Recommendations

Now that you are more familiar with the main types of lighting in a house, styles, and lighting fixtures, you may want to discover how to light up a room to stand out in all its glory truly. This next section will tell you how to do just that, as well as how to brighten up a room and get more light in a room in a natural, effortless way.

Hallway

The entryway to your home requires a welcoming yet exciting type of lighting. Consider a large chandelier, pendant light, or even a floor or table lamp to create accent lighting that will entice potential buyers to discover more about your home.

Living Room

You can get creative with your living room lighting, especially if the room is large and has several sections. For instance, task or accent lighting works perfectly if your living room features a reading corner.

Do you envision your buyers hosting small parties or gatherings in the living room? Combining ambient and accent lighting can help bring more vibrancy and spaciousness to the area.

Last but certainly not least, to ensure the entire room gets all the light it needs when the sun goes down, install a good ceiling light or recessed lighting.

Kitchen

Another part of the house where you can truly unleash your creativity when it comes to lighting is the kitchen. Kitchens also include a few different spaces, such as where you prepare food, cook, and plate up the final dishes.

If you like, you can select a specific type of lighting for each of these spaces — we recommend ambient lighting for the overall room, task lighting for the preparation and cooking areas, and accent lighting for the plating-up area.

Dining Room

The dining room can be a place to share small, intimate meals or where friends and family gather for a more boisterous event. For this reason, it’s best to combine one central lighting fixture — possibly a pendant light — with a few accent or task lighting pieces. These will ensure that, whatever the occasion, your dining room will always serve its purpose in style.

Bathroom

Most people prefer subtle lighting in their bathrooms, so recessed lighting often works well. If you have a vanity cabinet or other small storage areas, you can also add some accent and task lighting.

Bedroom

To ensure a good and restful night’s sleep, it’s essential to choose ambient and accent lighting that leads to a feeling of relaxation. But don’t overdo it: One overhead light fixture and a couple of bedstand lamps will often suffice.

Additional Tips for Brightening Up Your Home

Whether you are preparing your home for an open house or are welcoming individual visitors without having organized a professional home staging, the light you choose for your property can be a significant determinant in the success of your sale.

As this guide has outlined, there are many different lighting styles and even more lighting fixtures. To ensure you make the most of them, you’ll want to combine some of them while also ensuring that natural light is plentiful throughout your entire home.

And remember that it’s not just lighting that can brighten up your home. You can achieve great results by strategically choosing your interior design and décor. So take a look at some of the tips below.

• Mirrors: Using mirrors around your house is one of the best ways to attract more light, even in the darkest corners. With a mirror, you can create the illusion of a larger space and simultaneously reflect the light already in the room, thus boosting its brightness.
• Furniture: If you want to brighten up a particularly dark room, consider adding lightly colored pieces of furniture to it. This is especially important if that room has dark flooring — a much more expensive element to replace — and if some of the accessories in the room are in darker shades.
• Accessories: Accessories are another great way to bring more light into a room. For example, if you stick with darker flooring and furniture (or can’t afford to invest in new ones), try placing lighter accessories around the room, such as cushions and throws.
• Indoor plants: We all know and love the benefits of being surrounded by nature, right? Well, imagine how great bringing those benefits into your home would be. You can do so by adding indoor plants to the different rooms of your house and also enjoy the brighter, lighter atmosphere they help create.
• Wall paint: Another clever idea to create the illusion of a brighter room is to select the right type of wall paint. Opt for neutral shades of whites and pastels, and avoid darker colors that can make a room look and feel smaller and less appealing.
• Fairy lights: Far from being relegated to children’s bedrooms or backyards in the summer months, indoor fairy lights can also double as a playful and inexpensive way to add some accent or task lighting to most rooms around the house, particularly living rooms and bedrooms.

Lighting Sells!

Choosing the right type of lighting for a house can truly make or break a home sale. However, to select the best lighting for each room, it’s important to familiarize yourself with lighting styles and specific lighting fixtures.Are you in the process of selling your home and looking for even more advice, information, and resources on how to do so quickly and profitably? Check out our How to Sell Your Home Sellers Guide. It is packed with handy, up-to-date, and clever ideas, recommendations, and tools to help you sell your house.