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Do you ever look at the photographs of beautiful homes in lifestyle magazines and wondered how they get to look so stunning? Well wonder no more, the secret is simply good lighting.

I’m sure you recognise that archetypal image that film producers constantly fall back on to convey “dank prison”, you know, the single, over bright light bulb dangling from the ceiling. And you’re certainly accustomed to the sleek alluring lighting that many stores use to try and attract you in. But would you want to base your own home lighting on either of these motifs?

But the extraordinary thing is that a surprisingly large number of people actually do veer towards one or the other of these polar opposites creating an outcome that is as predictable as it is hideous. Rooms where the lighting is principally provided by overhead ambient light invariably acquire a flat, drab and featureless quality that almost saps the soul. Rooms full of strong accent lighting and eye-catching feature lamps might look impressive with their barrage of dramatic shadows and powerful contrasts but are almost certain to cause eye-strain and give you a headache in short order.

The secret to creating successful home lighting is to combine aspects of all four main lighting types: ambient, task, accent and decorative. Obviously you should vary the ratio of one to the others according to the intended purpose and desired effect, but it is the combination of these lighting types that works best for most domestic environments.

Consider an example using music, where a band consists of lead guitar, vocals, drum and bass. It’s perfectly normal for any one element to be noticeably louder or quieter than the others, but if one drops out totally or instead drowns out the others then it is instantly apparent that the sound is simply not quite right, and this exact same principal applies to lighting.

So what exactly are these four lighting types and how do you combine them to get the best effects?

The first group is related to functionality – usable lighting.

Ambient light is defined as a diffuse light that provides all round non-specific illumination. In domestic environments it is very often found in lights hung from ceiling roses and in work spaces the mainstay for ambient light is the fluorescent tube. It is necessary to create a base platform that other types of lighting then work from, since without ambient light they would oddly enough appear both over bright (due to too much contrast) yet not bright enough to actually light the whole space.

Task lighting is for assisting with particular tasks, for example food preparation, school homework, reading a magazine, and so on. It should illuminate only the zone where the task is to be performed and be bright enough to see clearly but not so bright as to cause glare and strain the eyes.

The second two forms of lighting are about style – how things look, creating a mood.

Accent lighting is simply using light to pick out whatever features you want to enhance; these could be books on a shelf, sculpture, wood panelling, brightly colored fabrics, the shape of a piece of furniture, the line of a wall, anything really. The point to remember is that the light source itself should be inconspicuous – it is the thing being lit that is on show.

Decorative lighting is similar to accent lighting, the principal difference being that this time it is the light source itself that is the focus of attention. Examples might include LED feature lights or a sculpted floor lamp.

Blending these various forms of lighting requires little more than arranging for them to be on separate controls. Certainly in the case of task lighting it’s often the case that when the task is not being performed you want to be able to switch it off and restore the room to a non-task mode.

Of the main lighting types, the most important is without question ambient lighting. Although it is the least noticeable it nevertheless provides the framework for the other types and thus determines how the overall effect appears. Accordingly, the single best piece of advice for creating successful home lighting has to be: control your ambient lighting with a dimmer switch.

The use of accent lighting tends inevitably to be driven by the availability and location of features you want to accent, but try not to focus it all in one spot. Finally, decorative lights can be positioned anywhere you like really, but in practice are often used to either fill in gaps in the lighting scheme or to deliberately draw the eye in certain directions.

So that’s a brief overview of basic home lighting design, but there is much more to this topic than meets the eye (so to speak). For example, contemporary designs are increasingly based around LED lights, not only because of the stunning effects possible with LED lights, nor even because they are far and away the most efficient (and therefore cheapest) form of lighting, but for the simple reason that it won’t be too many years before LED has totally replaced all other forms of home lighting.

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