We could spend the entire year living under a solitary dangling pendant but when it comes to December, lighting becomes a whole other story. How do you light your home for the Yuletide?
Human need
We are attracted to the light. We will walk to the lightest part of the room intuitively, be it a window or a fabulous chandelier. It touches us somehow, supporting us, making us feel spiritual, pensive, or romantic, or celebratory or simply warm and cosy. And at Christmas we tend to want to feel all of those emotions.
Indoor lighting choices
Beautiful candles standing dutifully, tea light clusters bring flickering patterns to walls, fairy lights draw out shapes, the porch, a star, a heart or perhaps less stylish, but maybe simply more Christmasy, they create an arrow to show where Father Christmas and Rudolph must land to bring the children their myriad of presents.
Rope lights strewn effortlessly across the floor add low-level interest - up until they are covered with Christmas presents and the fear of smouldering (sorry to ruin the feel good vibe with such practical necessities!).
Outdoor lighting options
Outdoor lighting can have a transformative effect on your home and is certainly not limited to icicles and snowflake designs. A well-chosen lantern for the porch will always provide a much-needed greeting at the end of a day's work. Contemporary wall lights that pick out feature stone or house numbers add to the outdoor décor. If you are lucky enough to have them, then picking out niches, columns or other architectural features is almost mandatory to celebrate the façade of your home. But if you're not so lucky, then a choice shrub or tree can be lit instead to highlight your good taste.
Kitchen & dining room
A decorated kitchen is only for those who have too much time on their hands unless of course it's also the dining room where festoonery is all but obligatory. Candelabras, mirrored sconces, mantelpieces adorned with natures own, a centrepiece for the table, in fact, a new chandelier is not entirely out of the question.
Practical considerations might be given to the sheer volume of guests that are to be housed (and whether an abundance of wires is an issue). Also heights of table decorations must also be in proportion with those who are sitting opposite one another. Grandma might not be the best conversationalist but the ivy wrapped cathedral candle will have less to say, I'm sure.
Bathroom
The bathroom is not the immediate choice of room to decorate at this festive time but candles in clusters (especially the scented variety) bring about romance and I'll leave your imaginations there.
Bedrooms
Leave the children to decorate their bedrooms and be left with the joys of peeling sellotape from the ceiling for most of January but it makes them happy and who knows what thoughts dance through their heads as they go to sleep at night snuggled up to the tinsel that refuses to stay stuck to the walls.
"Some day perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Niki Schafer is the founder of dwell-being designs ( www.dwell-being.com ) based in Henley on Thames
Dwell-being designs inspiring spaces, inherently yours.
In truth, she's actually far too down-to-earth to be an interior designer, but she's passionate about colour and texture and re-arranges furniture within minutes of entering an establishment so the career choice became more of a must than anything else.
She's also a writer. This started with an obsession with Scrabble and grew into sentences and paragraphs later.
Niki is a phenomenally inspiring wife and mum and reminds her family of this on a daily basis.
In her spare time, Niki experiments in a number of martial arts in a pair of lilac boxing gloves.
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