What could be a better pastime than spending your evenings in a warm, cozy log home? Even though few experiences can top this delight, getting the lighting right in your cabin can help improve your homeownership experience even more. As you begin designing your new log home with Frontier Log Homes, consider these helpful lighting tips to ensure you have the right light everywhere.
1. Design Your Cabin to Maximize Natural Lighting
Using natural light for log home lighting can dramatically reduce your energy costs and boost your mood. However, this requires careful planning as you design the layout of your cabin and its placement on your property. You must also consider the windows you’ll include in your home and their placement throughout the cabin.
Consider an Open Floor Plan
An open floor plan with high ceilings allows sunlight to flow throughout your home, therefore improving your log cabin lighting. Many of our floorplans, especially ones in the 1500-2500 square foot range, work with an open floor plan on the first floor and open space to the second floor. This provides ample natural lighting for log homes and a more cohesive living space.
Window Placement and Size
Window size and strategic window placement are essential for natural log home lighting. When you position your windows, think about which direction the sunlight will come from throughout the day and plan accordingly. Also, try to place your windows in key areas, such as bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms. Doing this will distribute light throughout your log home.
As we plan out lighting for log homes, we encourage our clients to install large windows in key parts of their houses to maximize natural lighting. These windows also look great with the rustic atmosphere of log homes, as you can see in our log home image gallery.
2. Try Track Lighting for Ceilings
Log cabin lighting is a tricky endeavor because log walls tend to absorb light. Natural light may not provide enough brightness, especially for homes with tall ceilings. Track lighting may help you add log home lights for better visibility.
As the name implies, track lighting is a fixture with a support rail mounted on a ceiling. Each light on the track draws power from the rail, which means you can place them anywhere along the track. Additionally, track lighting often includes directional adjustments, so you can direct each lamp any way you desire. These lights are great for high ceilings but also work well in spaces like kitchens or living rooms.
3. Consider Wall Fixtures for Level Lighting
The most defining feature of log cabin architecture has to be the high walls necessary to support vaulted ceilings. Thankfully, high walls give you plenty of opportunities to install wall fixtures that enhance your rustic cabin lighting.
You should install wall fixtures about five feet above floor level. Also, you should place multiple wall lights throughout a room, spacing them approximately eight feet apart. These recommendations will ensure that the top of the light sits at eye level and fills the room with light even in the evenings.
4. Think Smarter With Modern LEDs
According to the State Department of Energy, LED lighting is the most energy-efficient technology in modern times [1]. Additionally, quality LED bulbs are more durable and offer better lighting quality than many other log cabin lights.
LED bulbs provide bright lighting that is critical for spaces with high ceilings. Further, the bulbs can be purchased in various colors and shapes, easily fitting into any space. You can install LED lightbulbs into any log cabin lights
5. Enhance the Aesthetics With Feature Lighting
Feature lighting, also called architectural lighting, may improve the feel and look of your log cabin while drawing attention to your favorite objects. Architectural lighting extends beyond ambient lighting to create the right mood and highlight desired features in the room.
This type of lighting, powered by durable, compact, and efficient LED bulbs, enables cabin owners to create personalized log cabin lighting projections remotely. In this light, cabin owners can alter the brightness, color, and direction of their log cabin lights through easy-to-use controls depending on their preferences.
6. When All Else Fails, Add Lamps
Lamps are the easiest log cabin lights to install. They offer various log cabin lighting options for themes and ambiance. Consider trying bulbs with different levels of warmth to create different moods. The right log cabin lighting lamp can add fun and décor to your log home.
Additionally, you may desire a reasonable amount of log cabin light for different activities. You may pair every seat with a reading lamp for reading. Use table lamps fitted with translucent shades to add a personal style to the room while contributing significantly to the overall ambient level in the log cabin. Lamps are important to log cabin lights because they bring the right brightness to realize numerous objectives.
Partner With Frontier Log Homes to Brighten Your New Home
Frontier Log Homes is Western Colorado’s premier log home builder. We not only want to design a home for you that meets all of your desires, but also takes functionality into account when designing it. We can help you determine the best build for lighting purposes and ensure you’ll enjoy your home for years to come.
To see our designs in the wild, check out our log cabin gallery.
References
[1] https://www.nahb.org/subsites/log-homes/buyers-guide/design-pages/how-to-design-a-cozy-log-cabin
