Home cinema lighting
When it comes to designing your perfect home cinema, lighting is a key consideration. While you want to ensure you’re installing the best possible audio-visual equipment so that you can enjoy an immersive experience, your home cinema lighting should not be overlooked. That’s because strategically placed illumination can enhance the overall ambience of the space, adding to your viewing pleasure.
Home cinema lighting ideas
So what are the options and the benefits of each? Let’s take a look some cinema room lighting ideas to help you decide on the best solution for your space.
Downlighting
A classic option is to have spotlights that are recessed into the ceiling to provide a soft, glare-free effect. These typically come in either square or round shapes, and a variety of colour temperatures. Not only are the unobtrusive, they can easily be dimmed or brightened manually, or integrated into your home automation system, so that they dip to the perfect level at the same time as the projector emerges, for example.
LED strip lighting
LED strip lighting is great at creating an ambience. It can often be set to different colours to create different atmospheres and is particularly useful if you have steps in your space. It can also be used to illuminate the underside of seats or storage to intriguing effect. If you choose to have a TV screen in your home cinema instead of a projector screen, you can place an LED strip around the back side of the TV, which produces an ambient-like halo around the screen, helping to reduce strain on the eyes.
Sconces
Wall-fitted scones are a popular cinema room lighting choice, as they provide lighting that shines up and down without producing any outward glow. The illumination is soft and glare-free, as well as easy to dim when it’s time to start the movie. Sconces work well in narrow spaces or home cinemas that have low ceilings.
Cove lighting
Another favourite home cinema light setup among our clients is cove lighting. It’s a great way to increase the ambient light of your room without negatively impacting your viewing experience, since there’s no glare and no light spill onto the projection screen. Cove lighting, as the name suggests, requires the light source to be concealed within a recess in the wall or ceiling, and LED strips can be utilised here to create the desired effect.
A note on smart lighting
Smart lighting is ideal for a home cinema room, as it enables you to create different light settings, called ‘scenes’, for your varying needs. You can then access each scene at the touch of a button. Smart lighting can also be integrated into your existing home automation system, enabling you to do everything – from dimming the lights and lowering the projector to setting the perfect ambient temperature – with one press of a button. We often recommend Lutron Home Cinema Smart Lighting for those looking for a smart lighting solution.
Home cinema lighting design
If you’d like help with designing your home cinema lighting, speak our expert home cinema installers here at New Wave AV. As specialist home cinema installers, we can help you create the ideal ambience for your space. Contact us today to book a demo at our Tonbridge showroom.
