LIGHTING FOR INTERIOR CEILINGS

When it comes to lighting your home from the ceiling, you can choose styles ranging from chandeliers to recessed lighting, track lighting, fluorescent bars and more. Each style has its own way of lighting a room, so you'll want to choose the fixture based on a mixture of functionality and design, depending on the room.

Chandeliers

Chandeliers provide a large, central fixture. They commonly appear in entryways, but you may find them in dining rooms, bedrooms or any area where there is a wide-open space and sufficient ceiling height to allow for the chandelier to be hung and still provide clearance for individuals walking through. One way to tie in chandeliers with the overall design of the home is to use them in conjunction with centralized floor patterns, such as a hardwood floor inset in the middle of a living room or a natural stone tile medallion set in the center of an entryway.

Track Lighting

Track lighting can be on stable tracks, hung from flexible cables, be straight or spiraled, have open bulbs or be encased. One way to use track lighting is above a stand-alone bar, such as in the kitchen or a finished basement, with the lighting focusing directly downward onto the surface. The earliest versions of track lighting were straight tracks, but modern variants can include complex patterns and lights that are set at different heights. Many track lighting systems are fully adjustable so you can point the lights in the direction you desire.

Ceiling Fan Combo

A ceiling fan and light combination is more useful in bedrooms and small areas as opposed to wide-open spaces. Ceiling fans often are mounted in a centralized location, and if you are working with a single unit, you are limited by however many light fixtures that particular ceiling fan has. However, multi-fixture units are available that disperse more light. In addition, if you are working in a larger, more open space and have the room to mount more than one ceiling fan, you can generate more light than just a single unit. On top of the light provided, you have the dual-purpose benefit of air circulation, which can help circulate cold or warm air depending on the direction of the fan blades, helping you be warmer or cooler.

Recessed Lighting

Recessed lighting is more for design purposes than for actually lighting an entire room. Because human beings perceive light based upon vertical surfaces more than horizontal, recessed lighting -- also known as can lighting -- does not always provide the most illumination. However, it is ideal for areas where the light specifically shines down onto a surface, such as a desk, shower or bar top. Recessed lights do little toward providing lighting for an entire room, but they create a certain visual appeal that may help define a space within a room while a chandelier or drop-down light fixture provides illumination for the rest of the room.