Light, design & the spaces people live in
Short weekly articles for lighting designers and interior designers — on vertical-plane illumination, circadian wellness, specification strategy, and the lived experience of light.
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Poor-View Windows Are a Design Problem. They're Also an Opportunity.
Almost every project has one. The window facing the neighbor's siding, the parking lot, the fence. It carries all the obligations of a window with none of the rewards. But a window has two jobs, view and light, and when the view fails we wrongly assume the window failed. Reframe it as a light source, and the worst window in the room becomes an asset.
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7 articles
Poor-View Windows Are a Design Problem. They're Also an Opportunity.
The window facing the fence or the parking lot carries all the obligations of a window with none of the rewards. Reframe it as a light source and it becomes an asset.
Light and Anxiety: What the Research Says About Soft Ambient Environments
Amber light produces the fastest cortisol reduction of any color tested. Here's what the UC Davis Color Lab findings mean for wellness-oriented design.
Hospitality Suites: The Lighting Detail Guests Feel But Never See
Why 90% of guests rank room comfort as the top satisfaction driver — and how a warm ambient layer from the window changes the first ten seconds of every stay.
Circadian Lighting Without the Ceiling: A Specification Opportunity
The daily arc your body needs — dawn rise, active day, evening dim, night rest — delivered from the window instead of four to six tunable ceiling fixtures.
The Room With No Lamps: What Happens When You Remove Every Visible Light Source
A thought experiment for interior designers: strip the lamps, the cans, and the pendants — then add light back from the window. The room isn't darker. It's more yours.
The Vertical Light Plane: Why Designers Are Moving Ambient Light Off the Ceiling
Why illuminating walls at 100 lux produces 3–5× the perceived brightness of floor illumination — and what that means for your next lighting plan.
The Light You Wake Up To Matters More Than You Think
Every morning begins with a negotiation between your body and the light around it. For designers, this is more than a wellness talking point — it's a design problem hiding in plain sight.
Coming Soon
Tuesdays weeklyThe Evening Wind-Down: Designing Spaces That Help People Actually Rest
What happens to the nervous system when evening light dims slowly from a warm lateral source instead of snapping off from above.
Fewer Fixtures, More Atmosphere: A Minimalist Lighting Philosophy
The case for radical simplification — fewer visible sources, cleaner ceilings, and an ambient foundation that disappears into the architecture.
Patient Rooms, Staff Wellness, and the Case for Window-Integrated Light in Healthcare
How circadian-aligned, vertical-plane illumination supports recovery, reduces staff fatigue, and simplifies infection-control cleaning.
Super Diffusion: Why the Quality of Light Matters More Than the Quantity
Inside the three-layer louver system that eliminates hotspots, glare, and shadow — and why "more lumens" is the wrong metric.
The Light People Remember: Why Clients Attribute Great Lighting to Their Designer
The specification decisions people never notice — and the ones they credit to the person who made them.
Light that feels better to live with
The super-diffused quality of LiteLüvr is something you have to experience. One showing changes the conversation.