The Lighting Decisions That Make a Luxury Home Feel Festive Without Looking Overdone
By Kate Longley • Kate Longley Designs
The holidays have a way of making people do things to their homes they would never do in January.
Lights everywhere. Candles on every surface. And sometimes it all works beautifully. But sometimes you walk into a room that’s trying so hard to feel festive that it just feels busy. The warmth you were going for gets a little lost in all the effort.
I’ve been thinking about why that happens. And I think it comes down to one thing. Festive lighting isn’t about adding more light. It’s about being a little more intentional with the light you already have.
The first thing I’d try is to warm everything down.
If you haven’t already switched to warm bulbs, the holidays are a lovely moment to do it. Warm light makes candlelight look better, makes food look better, makes people look better. It’s one of the simplest changes you can make, and the difference is immediate.
And if you have dimmers, now is the time to use them. There’s something about a room at sixty percent brightness that just feels different. More settled. More like somewhere you want to stay.
Candles are my favorite tool this time of year, but I think they work best when they’re placed with a little thought rather than everywhere at once.
The dining table. The coffee table. A console in the entry that’s the first thing guests see when they walk in. A few in the right spots do more for the feeling of a room than a lot of them scattered without a plan. I also love varying the height and grouping them rather than spacing them out evenly. It feels more collected that way, less like a display.
The thing that surprises people most when I talk about holiday lighting is this: letting some corners stay a little dark.
It sounds counterintuitive. But a room with some shadow and depth feels so much more atmospheric than one that’s uniformly bright. The darkness is what makes the candlelight glow. It’s what gives the room that sense of occasion that’s hard to put your finger on but very easy to feel.
In Paradise Valley especially, where the evenings are mild and you can have the doors open, the way warm light spills from inside into the night is one of my favorite things about the holidays here.
The goal, I think, is a home that feels like something special is happening without announcing it too loudly.
Warm. A little golden. You don’t need very much to get there. Just the right things, in the right places, turned down just enough.
If you’re thinking about a larger lighting project or a renovation going into the new year, I’d love to talk through it. I work with a small number of clients at a time, and I’m thoughtful about fit.
KATE LONGLEY DESIGNS
Paradise Valley · Scottsdale, Arizona