Imagine the front door to your home opening onto a lovely, warm and inviting interior. The mood and effect that you create, through your indoor lighting fixtures, sets the scene and can create a positive impression. This is not difficult to achieve, if you know what to look for and what to do.

The most common problem with lighting entrances and hallways is that these areas tend to be narrow and confined spaces with little or no room for furniture and accessories and worse, there is often a shortage of natural light here too. Therefore, working with a dark and dingy space can seem a little difficult at first. The best way to approach this is to consider the main objective which is to have a bright and welcoming effect which combines both artificial light and daylight and in doing so effectively eliminates the gloom.

One of the best ways of doing this is to use a mixture of both uplighters and downlighters. Downlights, especially the low-voltage ones, can mimic daylight but by themselves can make the hallway space appear even smaller because they make the ceiling seem lower due to the light from the downlighter falling straight onto the floor. However, using an uplighter as well in this space will give more emphasis to the ceiling providing a feeling of spaciousness. Therefore, use both for a maximum and optimal lighting effect.

Wall-mounted light fittings tend not to work so well in narrow spaces so avoid these at all costs.

On the other hand, a central hanging pendant light, used in conjunction with other light sources (such as downlights surrounding the pendant lighting) will look good too.

Another way of making a dark and dingy entrance hall more appealing is to create focus in the middle distance. For example, by placing an ornament or picture on a half-landing and using a light source to cast light on this object. In this way focus is immediately detracted from the narrow and confined hallway and drawn instead to the lit object in the middle distance.

Areas that can seem particularly difficult to lighten are long corridors with no windows and hence no natural daylight coming in. Plants and occasional tables would be possible obstructions in these types of narrow areas but by hanging up pictures and using picture lights to create focus is an effective way of brightening up a bare corridor.

Therefore, a variety of indoor lighting fixtures can be put to effective use by highlighting features of interest or by creating different lighting effects on the surrounding walls and ceiling to make dark and dingy entrance halls appear more bright and welcoming.