Understanding Layered Lighting

Layered lighting is a technique used by interior designers and lighting professionals that coordinates the lights in a room to make the room and everything in it look better. By adjusting layers of light, you can create different scenes that transform a room’s look or feel, or dial in a certain mood to suit a particular activity. 

There are three different types of lighting: ambient, task and accent. Each has a role in the creation of layered lighting.

Ambient

Ambient light is the overhead lighting meant to evenly illuminate a room. It's the light that surrounds you and is often in fixtures such as recessed lighting and chandeliers. Ambient lighting is something also called "general lighting".

Task

Task lighting is meant to emphasize a specific task. It's used when doing activities such as reading or cooking and achieved by using fixtures such as desk lamps or under-cabinet lighting to bring focus to an area or surface where your activities are occurring.

Accent

Accent light is often decorative or used to highlight a particular object. It's typically achieved by sconces or spotlighting, which can be beautiful on their own or used to bring focus to artwork, for example. Accent light helps with the overall aesthetics of the room. 

NOTE: When these three types of lights are blended together at varying levels of brightness, you can design scenes that will transform a room. Experiment with the level of each type to discover how lighting scenes can change a look, feel or the experience of an activity in a room.

Experiencing layered lighting with NOON

The NOON Lighting System coordinates your existing lights to create beautiful layered lighting for any room in your home. NOON uses advanced algorithms based on layered lighting design principles to automatically blend and layer these three types of lighting to create scenes for your room. The type of fixture and light bulbs you use also impact the effect of layered light. To learn more, visit our page on bulbs or our page on fixtures.

To experience layered lighting with NOON:

• You’ll first need to pick a room. We recommend common areas in your home, such as your living room, dining room, kitchen or open plan.
• Make sure that all of the lights and bulbs have dimming functionality. NOON is compatible with non-dimmable bulbs as well; however, for the best experience, dimmable bulbs are recommended. To learn more, visit our page on bulbs.  
• Install one NOON Room Director per room and up to 10 NOON Extension Dimmer and/or On/Off Switches for each Room Director. NOON highly recommends that you replace all light switches in your room with NOON products. This allows you to control the overall feel of the room. Visit our page on what you need to get started with NOON to learn more.