How I Beautified My Home With Custom Lighting
By Bill Primavera
Before I made the move to my current home in Trump Park in Yorktown, I got permission from management to have an electrician install custom lighting from the ceiling, all planned to highlight my collection of paintings – antique portraits and landscapes.
Sometimes the use of lamps that focused lighting on our side walls is all the illumination I use when creating a mood at home. It can be quite effective.
My interest in lighting as an aspect of decorating started early. When I was in college, I appeared in a play called “The Madwoman of Chaillot” by Jean Giraudoux with the actress Linda Lavin who would later go on to achieve fame as “Alice” on television. The most stunning thing about that production was the amazing effects achieved by its lighting director, on staff in the theater department, who was an incredible talent.
I remember that when the curtain rose for the second act, the stage was completely dark and slowly a small pin spotlight illuminated only the face of the madwoman in the center of the stage. Just that lighting effect alone brought applause from the audience.
Every scene of the play was an arresting study in shadow and light where brightness drew the viewer’s attention where it needed to be while other areas of the stage receded. I was mesmerized as I observed how light created movement and mood by playing off stationary surfaces.
Many years later I was reminded of my interest in stage lighting when Barry Liebman, director of Yorktown Stage, shared with me that a production really doesn’t come to life until the lighting director does his or her job. He went so far to say that seeing a set dramatically lit for the first time has brought him to tears.
That convinced me that someday I should have a home where its lighting would be as dramatic as a stage set, and that would require a custom-designed lighting system. I was also influenced by my Aunt Pearl who lived in a condo in Brooklyn Heights and was quite salty. She observed that her next-door neighbor was so cheap that, at night, the whole family would gather around the one lamp in the living room.
Having always lived in antique homes, my lighting was primarily from traditional lamps. When I moved to the new Trump Park Residences, however, my dream for dramatic lighting presented itself.
I arranged with management to have electrical contractors work with me to install a system to light my great room and dining room, which I had designed basically as an art gallery for my collection of portraits and landscapes. The lighting system I planned was to highlight the paintings on three walls: portraits on the living room side, pastorals on the dining room side and a large abstract on the third wall in between.
At first, I was planning to hire a lighting designer, but I was lucky to find an electrician with sensitivity to my ideas and needs, and partnering with an electric supply company, we all worked wonders together.
There were many technical challenges to overcome working on the top fifth-floor condo with 10-foot ceilings, installing high hats in a soffit with insulation material. The casing for the high-hat units I originally wanted turned out to be too large to be accommodated in the soffit, but I had the good fortune to be assigned an electric job manager who was as much an artist as he was an electrician.
He guided me every step of the way in terms of which product to use – we sourced a small LED light whose imprint on the ceiling is only two inches square – as well as the appropriate spacing and angles of light to employ. And he cut such clean holes that nary a speck of spackle was needed for patching the plasterboard.
Now completed, the overhead pin spots illuminate my great room/gallery in a warm and inviting way. Rather than being surrounded by flat walls with two-dimensional shapes on them, the lighted paintings create great depth and richness to our space.
While we have other traditional lighting sources in the room, it really requires no light other than that resting on the faces of the portraits and on the landscapes of the pastorals. The effect takes us to other acquaintances and distant places beyond the space we occupy. It’s transporting.
Bill Primavera is a realtor associated with William Raveis Real Estate and founder of Primavera Public Relations, Inc., the longest running public relations agency in Westchester (www.PrimaveraPR.com). His real estate site is www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com. To engage the services of The Home Guru and his team to market your home for sale, call 914-522-2076.
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