Floor Lamps 101: Know Your Light Fixtures

One of the main goals of home décor is to make your space inviting. The right interior lighting adds the perfect amount of warmth to any room. For interior designers, a major point of direction will often be your home's lighting design. With numerous styles to pick from, it can be overwhelming to decide how to best light up your home.

Floor lamps can be a little tricky to perfectly incorporate into your home's design. Here are some simple tips to make floor lamps a significant part of your home lighting:

1. Look to Small Spaces
Floor lamps can provide additional ambient lighting in a room or act as task lighting for reading and other activities. Floor lamps truly shine when it comes to adding layers to your rooms lighting plan.

Using these fixtures in small places such as a reading nook, a dining room corner or entryway can bring extra brightness to your home's lighting. As shown in this photo by Kichler Lighting, these fixtures boost the amount of light while taking up a small amount of space.

2. Don't Forget to Measure
Floor lamp fixtures and lampshades need to be properly measured so you know they will fit perfectly in your home. Avoid eyeballing floor lamp sizes and shapes. Instead, measure the fixture so you know where it could fit in your home before you buy it. A trained lighting professional in an ALA showroom can help you with this process.

You need to think about the weight of a floor lamp as well. High-traffic areas of your home should have heavier and sturdier fixtures to avoid breakage or being knocked over. However, in low-traffic areas, lighter, more delicate floor lamps can add the perfect touch to the space.

3. Focus on Your Corners
There's no set rule for where or how you set up your floor lamps, but it's always good to use this fixture to light three of the four corners in a room. Whether your floor lamp is powerful enough to light three corners, you may want to focus on just one corner of the room, and use table lamps to illuminate the other areas.

Following this three-fourths method will prevent you from incorporating too much light and will appropriately illuminate your home.

Visit your local ALA showroom or go online to americanlightingassoc.com to learn more about floor lamp light fixtures.