Your bathroom is one of the most valuable rooms in the house not only in terms of function, but also in terms of resale value if you end up selling your home. Bathroom lighting is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of designing a new build home or designing for a remodel. There are many delicate situations that occur in a bathroom, such as shaving, that can prove to be painful if adequate lighting isn’t available.
When considering your bathroom lighting options, there are a number of things to consider. First of all, if you are building or remodeling, you will need a layout for your bathroom. You really make any choices on your lighting options until you have a layout.
Depending on your budget and desires, you could always look at the International Association of Light Designers’ website:http://www.iald.org for a professional light designer (I looked up consultants in the DFW area and there were 13 options so you should have plenty to choose from, depending on your location). If that doesn’t fit the bill, you could either copy something you see in a home magazine, consult a lighting design book or wing it. Given my thriftiness, I would lean towards either finding a design I like of a bathroom and copying that or consulting a lighting design book. If you have the budget available, I’m sure consulting a professional from the previously mentioned website would be a great experience. If you do decide to hire a lighting consultant, be sure to call a few of the designers and ask for references around the type of design you want. You may not want to hire a person that specializes in commercial lighting design for your residential home.
Fundamentals of Bathroom Lighting
Layer the Light
I didn’t know what they meant by this at first, but it basically means you have more than one light source (I initially interpreted it to be rows of lights 
). In other words, you don’t want to have a single light source in a bathroom. Imagine walking into a bathroom with only recessed lighting in the middle of the bathroom. Can you then imagine trying to shave your face with a non-electric shaver or trying to dress a wound? Ya, not so much. Also, imagine how unflattering the bathroom would look.
When you are designing your bathroom or remodeling your bathroom, you will want to take into consideration there are 4 types of lighting:
1. Task lighting – This is lighting for shaving or applying makeup and depending how you want to appear to the world, this is pretty darn important.
2. Ambient lighting – This type of lighting is meant to decrease the number of shadows by bouncing light off of the ceiling.
3. Accent lighting – Accent lighting diverts attention to accent pieces in the room such as pictures, art or plants. It isn’t limited to those items, but those are typical.
4. Decorative Lighting – This one is pretty self explanatory, but it is lighting that gives the room a bit of zest or adds an art appeal. We are currently remodeling a house built in 1914 and will have a good bit of decorative lighting that doesn’t add a lot of lighting value, but rather takes us back to a different era.
The last three types of lighting are nice to have, but task lighting is pretty critical to any bathroom. For task lighting, you want a light either over the vanity mirror or on both sides of the mirror. There are plenty of homes that have it either way, so it is probably more of a personal preference than anything else. When you are installing the task lighting, it might be a good idea to “over light” the bathroom. This ensures you have enough light and you can always install dimmer switches to bring down the level of lighting to your preferred setting.
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