ᐅ New Construction Lighting: Spotlights and Electrical Preparation for Ceiling Fixtures?

Hello,

we visited a model home park on Sunday. We noticed that almost all the houses had recessed ceiling spotlights installed throughout most of the house. Traditional ceiling fixtures for standalone lamps were hardly seen.

Is it now standard practice to plan integrated lighting throughout the entire house? Would you recommend designing the whole house with recessed spotlights from start to finish, top to bottom?

We are not opposed to the idea, but would like to hear about the advantages and disadvantages to weigh up the options. What have your experiences been in this regard?

If you like recessed lights, you can go for it.
In show home parks, keep in mind that most houses have drywall ceilings, which makes the process much easier and requires significantly less planning.

With a precast concrete ceiling, it's much more complex, requiring advance planning and is likely to be considerably more expensive.

To come back to my first point: Is it cozy to have recessed lights everywhere?

The show home’s ceiling height can also be somewhat deceptive. Sometimes it is built a bit higher than in the actual houses to allow enough space for proper installation of suspended ceilings.

We have recessed spotlights throughout the entire house and are very happy with that decision. The lighting is perfect in every corner of every room!

In the living room, we also have indirect lighting to create a cozy atmosphere in the evening. Above the dining table, there is an outlet for a regular light fixture, also for the sake of coziness.

But what my predecessor said is true: the planning had to happen quite early, at least on the ground floor. We have a cast-in-place concrete ceiling. Of course, the recesses had to be installed and wired very early on. We did this ourselves, which kept the costs low.

On the upper floor, we have suspended drywall ceilings. Here, you can take a bit more time with the planning. You just need to roughly place and secure the wiring connections before installing the ceiling and then cut out the holes once the drywall is up. By the way, this is something you can also do very well yourself.

Is detailed planning of the lighting concept included in the architect’s design scope up to design phase 4?

We only have recessed spotlights in the bathroom. Each spotlight cost about €35 (approximately $38) just to have a box installed in the precast concrete ceiling. Compared to a regular light fixture, that’s quite expensive when you consider the entire room’s lighting.

We planned the spotlights together with the electrician—I doubt an architect would simply agree to that.

I’m actually glad I’ve always preferred regular light fixtures and, like in the rest of the house, we don’t have spotlights there. When drilling out the boxes for the spotlights, it became clear that either during the manufacturing of the ceiling or on-site when lifting the different elements, the boxes or elements shifted by a few centimeters (centimeters) (inches). We still managed to get them all in a straight line (our boxes were larger than the final spotlights, so there was some leeway—please don’t ask about the name!), but it now deviates slightly from the original plan. If we had had to redesign this for every room, it would have been frustrating—especially since more boxes increase the chance that one might be noticeably out of line...

I have no idea if these kinds of issues only happen in solid construction with precast concrete ceilings delivered to the site...