Page 78 - Lighting Magazine January 2020

NOW& NEXT with Nicole Davis
home. “Safety in the bathroom is now becoming what clients are actually asking for. If you fall in there, nothing will help you – there are hard sur- faces everywhere.”
Beyond safety, there’s also a focus on lighting for wellness in accessible homes. The potential of homes becoming a sanctuary is accomplished with appropriate and layered lighting, including sconces, portables, and the use of dimmers. “We need to be restored, to calm down and unwind when we come home...we can’t do that in rooms with wrong or inad- equate lighting,” Beach comments.
In other areas of design, accessibility means more attention is being paid to ergonomics. In the kitchen, for example, installing a wall oven versus drop-in range doesn’t require the user to bend over. Flooring is also a consideration, Beach remarks, and the sought-after option now is whatever is low maintenance. Carpet, she says, is very rarely used everywhere anymore.
“Overall, people are more open to incorporating different types of lighting than ever before,” Beach says. Whether that means installing a chandelier or sconces in places you wouldn’t think to put them in the past, or trying one of the myriad new smart home offerings, the result is not only accessible, but design-driven.
As a showroom, Beach suggests displaying digital photography of past projects that showcase acces- sible features to illustrate just what it all means and the difference it can make.
investment Kitchens
There is a downsizing trend in housing – median sin- gle-family home square footage clocks in at 2,245 square feet according to second quarter data from the Census Quarterly Starts and Completions by Purpose and Design and National Association of Home Builders analysis; in 2015, that number was nearly 2,500 square feet. According to the HDTS, this downsizing is mostly seen in the entry level/”affordable home” segment of the market, where the luxury end is actually reporting a slow increase in the size of homes.
But despite single-family home sizes getting smaller, a sizable portion of architecture firms are still reporting increased space and greater invest- ments in kitchens as they’ve become the center of the home for families today.
With the open-concept floor plans that are pined after, the kitchen becomes the focal point of the
Capital Lighting’s new Hugo Collection features this 8-light chandelier in a Grey Wash and Matte Nickel finish to create that “wow” moment in an open-concept space.
THE SHARE OF FIRMS REPORTING AN INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF KITCHENS CONTINUES TO GROW WHILE KITCHEN SIZES CONTINUE TO STABILIZE
Change in the number and size of kitchens, percentage of respondents
Data from Q4 2018 compared to data from Q4 2017.
■ 2017 ■ 2018 SOURCE: HDTS 2019
Number
Size
29%34% Increase
22%
30%
Increase
living area. Choosing a stand-out pendant or chan- delier can create a “wow” moment. “Light fixtures in this type of design act as the anchor of the space, bringing in a vertical break and division where walls no longer stand,” says Mollie Kitchens, Marketing Content Manager at Capital Lighting Fixture Co.
There’s the practical aspect, too: Proper lighting installed above islands, which have become the new dining table and homework area, as well as task lighting in food prep and cooking areas, can take a kitchen from blah to high-end.
9% 10% Decrease
4% 7% Decrease
Stable 61% 57% Stable 63%
74%
74 enLIGHTenment Magazine | january 2020
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