ᐅ Should you hire a lighting designer or not?

11ant schrieb:
You know you don’t want to fall on the stairs (= evenly bright lighting) and that red wine goes better with dimmed lighting (for searching lost earrings or contact lenses, there are LED flashlights).

As I said, we’ve already had serious troubles even in specialist stores. It even went as far as canceling the purchase contract afterward. I simply don’t trust myself to equip the house with the right light fixtures in the right places. I lack the imagination and market overview.

If even professionals find it difficult to sell the appropriate fixtures in this dense product jungle, how is it supposed to work when I just look up something with Aunt Google? Take the roof terrace... I don’t know how many spots with what output need to be installed at which distance up there to make it look good. And it’s like that throughout the whole house.

I find this very challenging. Until now, we’ve always lived with poor lighting, because it was never professionally coordinated. When we visit friends who can create different lighting scenarios in their living room, it’s great. Whether that’s done in the end by a lighting designer or a knowledgeable sales representative/installer doesn’t matter to me. But I’m definitely not going back to Heini Huber around the corner to the “lighting specialty store.” I only do things now where I can look at reference projects. Especially if you want to highlight the outdoor areas of your house a bit, there’s no way I can manage that alone.

R.Hotzenplotz schrieb:
But going to Heini Huber just around the corner to the "lighting specialty store" – I don’t do that anymore. Now I only deal with projects where I can check out reference projects.

Exactly. As a first step, get the contact details of the specialist dealers from the manufacturers. The right ones are likely to advertise in magazines like Ambiente, Architectural Digest, Interior, and similar. Or you could casually ask the bartender at the golf club.

---

https://www.instagram.com/11antgmxde/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bauen-jetzt/

We built a simple, rectangular, single-story house without a basement. We took on the DIY tasks ourselves, calculated carefully, and still hired a lighting designer. Cost: 0.21% of the total amount spent on the house and the land. By the way, we hardly own any artwork by others. In general, there are simply too few walls.

However, I was professionally predisposed and had attended several lectures on lighting design. We initially started planning the lighting ourselves with partial knowledge and realized it was not enough. We commissioned a well-reputed lighting company, paid for their services separately, and clearly communicated this as an independent contract. We are very satisfied.

What stuck with me from the lectures was, among other things, the following:
- Older people need significantly brighter light than younger people to perceive the lighting as equally good.
- The brain simply ignores corners of a room if they remain unlit—for example, a dining room with only central lighting above the table. Such corners are neither noticed in terms of room size nor used or walked through. They practically do not exist.
- The human eye always takes the brightest source (such as a window with sunlight) as the reference for “bright,” while everything else appears more or less dim. This also directs attention. A desk with a view? A library where you can also read at the table in the back? You then need either a slightly diffused window covering (frosted blind) or considerably more lumens in the room.

We would also have been uncertain about how many lumens are needed where.

If you can pull this off effortlessly on your own—great. The lighting designer can do it. I think it is a sensible and worthwhile investment.

Best regards,
Gabriele

I have now visited a lighting planner and got a good impression. We will definitely not do without it.

Will you show us the plans then? For those of us who are skeptical, it can only be beneficial to see how and what comes out of it 🙂

ypg schrieb:
Will you show us the plans then? For those of us who have doubts, it can only be valuable to see how things turn out 🙂

I can do that, of course. But it will take some time. First, we need to start with the design phase L4, because precisely drawn furniture is a prerequisite to begin. Our provider doesn’t do this before the building contract is signed – so far, they’ve only been commissioned for service phases 1-3.

I think "doubters" is the wrong word. There are people who place value on this kind of detail and people who don’t. For us, for example, this is a thousand times more important than whether the front door is frameless on the inside or not. It will never be the case that even 2 out of 1,000 people have exactly the same priorities when building a house.

Then we just need to decide whether to work with a general contractor electrician and implement a Loxone system, or separate the electrical work completely and give the electrical contract to a KNX specialist.