You work around interior designers, you pick up stuff. You help to draw up marketing materials for these home decorators, you get an idea for the kind of design ideas that work. And if there was one thing I learned from that experience–and there were at least two–it’s that when you want to do something really unique, innovative and creative with your decor, you cannot go wrong with lighting. Even better, within the mini-universe of decorative lighting, it is pretty ridiculously hard to go wrong. Lamps are cool, people. Lamps are cool. No matter what the design or idea behind it. The worst looking lamp is always a cooler piece of home decor than the coolest overhead light fixture.
Paper Lampshades
Paper lampshades were hot stuff during the 1970s and what says memorable home decor more than the 1970s? I ask you! Paper lampshades predate the 1970s by a little bit, truth be told. In fact, lamps shaded with paper products have been a popular method of delivering illumination in the Orient pretty much since there has been such a thing as paper. If you are utterly equipped with imagination and DIY talent, there really is no limit to the ways you can shade a lamp using paper products. If you are not that well endowed with DIY artistry, here’s an easy shortcut to paper lampshades as home decor you can love for decades: use fairy lights covered with wire wrapped around wooden frames and covered with delicate paper. The result is a glowing orb effect that lends a sense of exotic style to any décor.
Track Lighting Ultra
Under normal circumstances, I would never describe any type of home decor using the word “ultra.” But these are not normal circumstances. The track lighting I am about to describe a creative and imaginative bit of home decorating idea fuel really does qualify as “ultra.” How so? By fastening a curving track that spans the entire length of your living room and attach track lighting to it. Arrange the curves on the track to hang over the places where you most need a source of direct light coming down on you. This track lighting design suggestion could potentially involve a half dozen or even a dozen different lighting fixtures. Heck, given a large enough room, a bottomless wealth of cash and your own desire to something really innovative, your track lighting ultra could involve dozens of lighting fixtures.
Brave Little Toaster Lamp
Did you ever seen the cartoon made of Thomas Disch’s delightful kids’ book, The Brave Little Toaster? (NOT to be confused with his macabre book not for kids, “The M.D.: A Horror Story.” It’s a standard table lamp not unlike the one that is used by Pixar in their logo. (Hmm…where’s the lawsuit there, I wonder….surely there would be one if it had gone the other way around.) This desk lamp has gone from being modernist to traditional over the decades since its introduction. Aside from one of those little green lamps like you see illuminating a pool table, you can’t get much more traditional and remain stylish than with this type of adjustable desk lamp. It’s the perfect lamp to place atop a piano or an old wooden desk.
Panel Lighting
Panel lighting is best utilized in a traditional decorating style as a downlighter onto a collection or as a bookshelf. You can get a bookshelf with a panel light on the bottom that makes an ideal decorative choice for a home office utilizing traditional design concepts. A single illuminated shelf has a certain sense of style that you can’t get from a lamp or even pendant lighting. You can also include panel lighting as a downlighter effect situated between two bookshelves that rise high along the wall. Cast the light down not upon books but upon the plants of indoor garden or your collection of Simpsons Treehouse of Horror action figures.
