Mood Lighting: The Three Settings That Really Create It, Room by Room

Mood lighting comes from three settings, not one: aim for about 20 lux instead of 100, roughly 800 lumens spread around a 20 m² living room; let that light leave a large, soft surface rather than a bare bulb; and share it between three to five low lights that you can switch on separately.

To most people, mood lighting means turning the lights down. That is exactly why it so often fails: you fit a dimmer, take the ceiling light to halfway, and the room stays the same room, only darker. A dimmer controls just one of the three things that make light soft. The other two, the brightness of the source itself and the way the light is shared around the room, cannot be set with a knob. Our range counts 64 lampshade pendants, 36 ceramic wall lights and 35 reading wall lights, and this guide explains, with the figures, how to combine them into real mood lighting, room by room.

Mood lighting is not a dimmed ceiling light

Three quantities describe the light in a room in the evening. They are independent of each other, and good mood lighting works on all three.

What you set	The quantity	With what	What it changes
The amount	The average light level in the room, in lux	The lumens switched on, a dimmer	The room is darker
The brightness of the source	The lumens divided by the surface they leave from	A shade, a diffuser, light bounced off a wall	You can look at the lamp without squinting
The distribution	The number of lights and their height	Several small, low sources instead of one high one	Bright zones and quiet zones

A single ceiling light on a dimmer only works on the first row. It cuts the output, and with it the brightness of its own surface, in the same proportion, so the contrast between the lamp and the room stays exactly as it was. You get the same flat light from overhead, just less of it. That is why a dimmed room looks dreary rather than soft, while the same room lit by three small lamps at the same number of lux feels warm. British homes walk into this trap easily, because most rooms are built around one pendant point in the middle of the ceiling, and the instinct is to ask everything of it.

You will also meet the term ambient lighting. In a lighting designer’s vocabulary it is the general layer, the light that fills a room so you can move around, alongside task lighting and accent lighting. Mood lighting is not a fourth layer: it is what the ambient and accent layers become in the evening, once they are lowered, softened and split up. If you are after the whole look, textiles and colours included, our guide to cosy lighting approaches it through style. Here we stay with the light and the numbers, taking the three rows in order.

How much light, and what colour

About 20 lux, not half of 100

A living room is usually lit to around 100 lux on average, which takes about 200 lumens fitted per square metre: that is the sum our guide to how many lumens you need sets out, doubling the target to allow for the light lost on the walls and inside the shades.

For an evening of mood lighting, the benchmark we use is five times lower, around 20 lux, and the late-night glow drops to about 5 lux. Neither figure comes from a standard: nothing sets light levels inside a British home. They come from the way the eye responds to light, described by the lightness function of the International Commission on Illumination: perceived brightness follows roughly the cube root of the light received. Our guide to the dimmable meaning explains that curve and how to check a bulb before you buy it; here, keep its consequence, which runs against intuition.

Moment	Average level	Lumens to fit in 20 m²	Perceived brightness
General evening light	100 lux	4,000 lm	100%
Mood lighting	20 lux	800 lm	52%
Film, late evening	5 lux	200 lm	27%

How to read it: dividing the light level by five takes away only half of the brightness you perceive. That is the good news about dimming, and it also explains the disappointment of the dimmer at halfway: at 50 per cent of the output, the room keeps about three quarters of its apparent brightness, and you conclude that nothing has happened.

The practical consequence for what you buy is blunt. Mood lighting in a living room is about 800 lumens in all, which is three small sources of around 250 lumens, or 2 to 3 W of LED each. Not one 1,521 lumen bulb turned down. If your evening lights add up to 3,000 or 4,000 lumens, no shade will make up for the quantity: take lumens out first, or make it possible to switch them off in groups.

What colour is best for mood lighting?

With the level set, the tint comes next. For the evening, 2,700 K is the reference, the warm white closest to an old filament bulb, and bulbs sold at 2,200 or 2,400 K give the golden glow of a filament turned right down. Our guide to cool white vs warm white gives the kelvin figure room by room.

Coloured mood lights, the colour-changing strips and RGB bulbs, are a different matter. A saturated colour uses only part of the LEDs inside, so it gives out a fraction of the lumens of the white setting, and it renders faces and food badly. Keep colour for an accent, behind a television or along a shelf, and light the room itself in warm white.

An honest note, because the opposite is often written. The idea that low light has to be warm to be pleasant goes back to a graph published in 1941 and repeated ever since. In 2017 a lighting researcher at the University of Sheffield reviewed the experiments that met good methodological practice. Within roughly 2,500 to 6,500 K, colour temperature made a negligible difference to how pleasant people found a lit interior; what counted was the level, with spaces below roughly 300 lux tending to be rated less pleasant (Fotios, 2017). Those trials asked people to rate lit interiors in general, not a sitting room wound down for the night, so they are no argument against mood lighting. They simply mean the case for warm white in the evening is not about looks.

It is about sleep. In a laboratory study, ordinary room light below 200 lux in the eight hours before bedtime delayed the onset of melatonin, the hormone that prepares sleep, in 99 per cent of participants, and shortened its release by about 90 minutes, compared with dim light below 3 lux (Gooley and others, 2011). That argues for the level first, which is precisely what mood lighting lowers. Warm white then adds a light with less blue in it: treat it as a sensible default for the evening, not a medical instruction.

One detail many people only discover after buying: a dimmed LED does not warm up as it goes down, unlike a filament bulb, whose glow slid towards orange. If you want that effect, you have to buy it, with a dim to warm bulb, or start from a very warm tint. And a 4,000 K bulb cannot be turned into mood lighting: dimmed, it gives a room that is dark and still cold, the worst of both.

Soften the source: what a dimmer cannot do

This is the point most guides leave out. Two bulbs giving out the same number of lumens do not have the same effect on the eye at all, depending on the size of the surface the light leaves from. That surface is what a shade, a diffuser or a bounce off a wall changes, and it is the one thing a dimmer never touches.

A shade divides the brightness, not the output

Take the same 806 lumen bulb, the equivalent of an old 60 W, in a B22 bayonet or an E27 screw cap, and look at the lumens leaving each square centimetre of lit surface. That ratio is not a laboratory luminance in candelas per square metre; it is an order of magnitude, worked out by us from common dimensions and an estimated transmission for each material. It is enough to see what is going on.

Between the clear bulb and the fabric shade, the ratio is more than a thousand. Look at the second bar above all: the clear bulb dimmed to 18 per cent of its output, the setting that halves the perceived brightness of the room, is still seven times brighter than a plain opal bulb at full power. A dimmer divides the output; it does not change the surface the light comes out of. That is why an exposed filament bulb, even turned right down, keeps drawing the eye and hollowing out faces: the bright point is still there.

There are three fixes, in order of cost. The cheapest costs a few pounds: swap the clear bulb for an opal one, which divides the brightness by forty without touching the fitting, and opal LEDs are easy to find in B22 as well as E27. The second is a closed fitting, an opal globe or a shade lined with a diffuser. The third, and the most effective, is a large shade in fabric, paper or natural fibre, which spreads the same light over about half a square metre.

A rule of thumb for choosing among our lampshade pendant lights: at equal output, brightness falls with the area of fabric. Doubling the diameter of a cylindrical shade halves its brightness, and quarters it if the height doubles too. Check the result switched on, from a seat: a fabric that is too thin shows the shape of the bulb through it and cancels the benefit.

Indirect light: the wall becomes the source

Indirect light takes the same logic to its end. The light goes up to the ceiling or across to a wall, which sends it back: the visible source is no longer the bulb but a surface of several square metres. It is the lowest brightness you can achieve at home, which is why this kind of light never tires the eyes.

The price is known and can be put in figures. A pale wall sends back 70 to 80 per cent of the light it receives, a mid tone about half, a dark shade much less. BS EN 12464-1, the lighting standard for indoor work places published in the UK by BSI, recommends ceilings that reflect 70 to 90 per cent of the light and walls 50 to 80 per cent. Under a deep-coloured ceiling, light sent upwards can lose more than half of its effect, as our guide to colour drenching shows fitting by fitting. In the sums at the start of this guide, count on an indirect source against a pale wall delivering about two thirds of its lumens to the room, and half against a strong colour.

The dimmer: useful on three conditions

A dimmer keeps all its value: it is what lets the same fittings go from tidying-up light to film light. But it calls for three checks, and the second one tends to catch out precisely the people fitting mood lighting.

• The bulb has to be dimmable. A non-dimmable LED on a dimmer flickers, buzzes, comes on in jerks or refuses to go down, and no setting will cure it. The guide to the dimmable meaning mentioned above shows the three places to check, in order of reliability.
• The dimmer has to see enough load. Every dimmer quotes a power range for LEDs, and the lower figure binds just as hard as the upper one. A wall dimmer might read LED 10 to 150 W, for example. Mood lighting runs on very small powers, and that is where the trap closes: one 3 W bulb on a dimmer that needs 10 W flickers or stays off, three of them, 9 W, still fall short, and four on the same circuit, 12 W, get through. Minimums vary from one model to the next, so read the LED figure before you buy. Choosing and wiring the right model is covered in our guide to the dimmer switch.
• An integrated LED fitting is judged on its own listing. With no lampholder, there is nothing to unscrew: the whole fitting is dimmable or it is not, and the answer is on its product page, not on a bulb box. A model sold as non-dimmable will never become dimmable.

One last point, specific to mood lighting: everything you care about happens at the bottom of the travel. A dimmer whose lowest setting stops at 20 per cent of the output will never get down to a late-evening glow. If the model lets you set its bottom limit, take five minutes to adjust it with your own bulbs in place.

Swapping a wall switch for a dimmer on the same circuit is not notifiable under Part P of the Building Regulations in England, but the work must still meet BS 7671, the IET Wiring Regulations, and we recommend a registered electrician. Wales has similar rules, while Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. For a table lamp, a plug-in or inline dimmer on the flex does the job without touching the installation.

How many lights, and at what height

The third quantity remains, and it is the one that makes the difference between a dark room and a room with mood lighting. The 800 lumens of our 20 m² living room are shared between three and five sources, or 160 to 270 lumens each. Our working rule fits in three lines.

• Three sources at least, five at most in a living room. Below three, dark corners remain and the room seems to shrink. Above five, you are back to even, uniform light, which is exactly what you were trying to leave. A simple check: no corner should be more than about 2 m from a source.
• Set them out in a triangle, not a line. Three lights in a row along one wall make a runway. The same three on three sides of the room, at different heights, give depth.
• Keep bare sources away from seated eye level. The eyes of an adult sitting on a sofa are about 1.1 to 1.2 m from the floor, and a visible bulb at that height dazzles every time. A table lamp is fine there, because its shade hides the bulb; a clear globe is not. Wall lights go well above it, at about 1.70 m to the centre of the light, the reference we use for wall light height, and a pendant over a table hangs at the height where nobody seated can see the bulb: sit down and have someone hold it before it is fixed.

One detail matters as much as the heights: each source has to be able to come on by itself. Three lamps on one switch give one setting, all or nothing. Lamps with a switch on the flex solve this without an electrician, and so do wall lights with a switch on the fitting once they are up. It is often the change that transforms a room more surely than a dimmer.

There is also a British answer to the opposite wish, lamps scattered around a room that you would like to bring on from the door: small round-pin sockets, 2 A or 5 A to BS 546, wired to a switch or a dimmer by the door. The lamps take a round-pin plug and come on together, each fitted with a dimmable bulb if the circuit is dimmed, and their combined load helps the dimmer clear its minimum. It is a job for a registered electrician, and if it means a new circuit it is notifiable under Part P in England.

Mood lighting room by room

The figures below apply the same method to four common rooms, with the lumens to fit for the mood setting, worked out as in the table above.

Room	Mood level	Lumens to fit	How to share them
Living room, 20 m²	20 lux	about 800 lm	The pendant off or at its lowest, two lights either side of the sofa, one small source in the darkest corner
Bedroom, 12 m²	15 lux	about 360 lm	Two reading lights at the bedhead, aimed at the wall or the page, the ceiling light off once you are in the room
Dining room, 14 m²	20 lux in the room, more on the table	about 560 lm	A pendant hung low over the table, carrying half of those lumens as an island of light, and one weak source elsewhere
Hall, 5 m²	20 lux	about 200 lm	One indirect wall light above the hall table, instead of the ceiling light

Mood lighting in a living room is the case that pays back first, because from November to January a British sitting room is lit by lamps from late afternoon: the evening setting is the one you live with longest. Mood lighting in a bedroom goes lower than in the living room, because you read there at close range: the useful light comes from the reading light, not from the room, and a reading light aimed at the wall turns into a soft indirect source once the book is closed.

The dining room is the opposite case, the only room where you deliberately accept strong contrast, because a lit table draws people together and the half-light around it flatters faces. Our 50 cm conical fabric pendant, closed underneath by a glass diffuser, does exactly this: three E27 holders, most of the light sent down onto the table, and in black, the gold lining glowing inside the shade. The hall is where the gain comes fastest, since a single ceramic wall light washing the wall is enough to replace the ceiling light.

The mistakes that stop mood lighting working

• A dimmer on a non-dimmable LED. It is the leading cause of flicker. Neither the dimmer nor the bulb is at fault: it is the pairing that does not hold.
• Dimming a single ceiling light and stopping there. The amount changes; the distribution and the brightness of the source do not. The room becomes dark without becoming soft.
• Keeping a clear bulb with no diffuser. Even turned right down, it stays the brightest point in the room. An opal bulb costs a few pounds and settles it.
• Buying too many lumens. A 2,000 lumen fitting in a room that wants 800 in the evening condemns you to live in the bottom quarter of the dimmer’s travel, where most bulb and dimmer pairs behave worst.
• A dimmer below its minimum load. Two or three small bulbs can add up to less than the dimmer can see. Add up the watts on the circuit before you choose it.
• Mixing colour temperatures. One 4,000 K bulb among sources at 2,700 K jumps out and undoes all the rest.
• Everything on one switch. Without a way to switch off in groups, there is no scene, so no mood lighting in the evening.

Mood lighting: frequently asked questions

Sources

• Fotios S., A Revised Kruithof Graph Based on Empirical Data, LEUKOS, 2017, 13(1), 3-17, doi 10.1080/15502724.2016.1159137. Scientific publication
• Gooley J.J. and others, Exposure to room light before bedtime suppresses melatonin onset and shortens melatonin duration in humans, The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2011, 96(3), E463-E472, doi 10.1210/jc.2010-2098. Scientific publication
• CIE 1976 L*a*b* lightness function L*. International Commission on Illumination
• BS EN 12464-1, Light and lighting, lighting of work places, part 1, indoor work places: recommended reflectance of 0.70 to 0.90 for ceilings and 0.50 to 0.80 for walls; BS 546, round-pin plugs and socket-outlets. BSI
• Approved Document P, Electrical safety: dwellings, and BS 7671, the IET Wiring Regulations. GOV.UK, IET and BSI