Clarity, comfort, and the spaces we shape
With insight from Lauren Brewer, RID, NCIDQ, Design Director at Nuance Interiors
Before light was measured, it was felt.
Long before fixtures, controls, or color temperatures, people understood what light could do to a space. Firelight brought people together. Morning light signaled activity. Softer light created calm. Harsh light created tension.
That really hasn’t changed.
We still respond to lighting in very human ways, often before we even realize it. And in building design, lighting plays a much bigger role in how a space feels than people sometimes give it credit for.
Too often, lighting gets treated as something that comes later in the process: fixture schedules, output requirements, code minimums, and efficiency targets. All of those things matter. But they don’t answer the more important question:
What is the experience supposed to feel like?
This idea came up repeatedly during a recent conversation with Lauren Brewer, RID, NCIDQ, Design Director at Nuance Interiors. With more than 15 years of experience designing multifamily, hospitality, student housing, and senior living environments, Brewer has seen firsthand how much lighting can influence the way people respond to a space.
One project in particular stood out.
Brewer described a student housing development where the corridors, despite being newly renovated, still felt dark and uncomfortable.
“It felt like a prison…not somewhere you’d want to walk through to get to your home every day.”
Technically, nothing was wrong. The layout worked. The finishes were appropriate. But the lighting changed how people experienced the space.
And that matters.
In residential and hospitality design especially, people tend to form impressions quickly. Lighting can make a space feel welcoming, cold, comfortable, stressful, open, or confined long before someone consciously processes why.
In this case, the solution wasn’t architectural. It was lighting.
By changing how the light was distributed and moving away from harsher cylinder-fixtures and changing wattage and color temperature, the same corridors became brighter, safer, and more inviting. The building itself didn’t change, but the experience of walking through it did.
“Lighting had to change to begin telling the design story.”
Light has Emotional Weight
Lighting is often discussed in terms of performance: footcandles, fixture counts, energy efficiency, controls, and code compliance. Those things are essential, but they are only part of the conversation.
Lighting also affects mood.
Color temperature alone can completely change how a room feels. Warmer lighting generally feels more intimate, inviting, and relaxed. Cooler lighting can feel cleaner, brighter, or more focused depending on the environment.
Brightness and warmth are not the same thing, but they are often treated that way.
“You can have a space designed as well as it can be designed, and if the lighting is off, it changes the entire personality of the project.”
How light is delivered matters too.
Overhead lighting can create glare and visual fatigue when overused. Layered lighting, using ambient, decorative, directional, and task fixtures together, tends to create spaces that feel more balanced and intentional.
“It is critical to have multiple light sources…ambient, decorative, task…that are all working together.”
A lot of how a space feels comes down to those secondary and tertiary lighting selections.
Designing for Human Experience
For Brewer, lighting selections start with understanding the people who will actually use the space.
“We try to understand the essence of the project: who the resident or guest is, how they live, where they frequent, and what they experience day-to-day. We design with that in mind.”
That perspective shifts lighting from being just a technical requirement to being part of the overall experience of the building.
Warm, dim lighting can encourage people to stay longer in a hospitality setting. Layered lighting can make a hospitality public space feel more comfortable and less transactional. Even small transitions in lighting can help people naturally move from more active public spaces into quieter areas.
A lot of the time, people may not consciously notice those decisions. But they subconsciously respond to them.
When Lighting Becomes a Constraint
One of the challenges is lighting conversations often happen too late in the design process. Instead of becoming part of the design strategy early on, lighting sometime gets reduced to layout grids, spacing requirements, and minimum output levels.
“A lot of times the space is thought of as a grid…but design doesn’t always fit perfectly into that.”
That’s where projects can start to lose some of their design intent.
“It often becomes ‘meet the required footcandles’ without understanding the design and purpose behind it.”
The best outcomes usually happen when architects, interior designers, engineers, and ownership teams are aligned on the project vision.
Brewer noted that some of the best collaboration comes from teams willing to ask questions instead of immediately shutting ideas down.
“The most valuable collaboration is when a challenge presents, the response isn’t ‘no’, it’s ‘what are you trying to achieve?’”
That mindset tends to create better results for everyone involved, especially the people who will eventually occupy and experience the space.
Lighting as Rhythm
In some environments, lighting takes on an even bigger role.
In senior living communities, for example, residents may have limited access to natural daylight throughout the day. In those spaces, artificial lighting can help support circadian rhythm, activity levels, comfort, and daily routine.
Controls are becoming an increasingly important part of that conversation.
Modern lighting systems allow communities to shift lighting output and color temperature throughout the day depending on how the space is being used. A multipurpose room might function with a group activity during the day where bright lighting is required, but in the afternoon, the same space can transition to feel more comfortable and social by changing the lighting sources to ambient fixtures with warmer color temperatures.
The room itself stays the same, but the experience changes.
Good lighting does more than light a room. It helps the space function the way it was intended to.
And often, the best lighting is barely noticed.
It’s the lighting that makes a space feel comfortable. The lighting that helps people move naturally through a building. The lighting that helps a room feel calm, welcoming, focused, or relaxed at the right moment.
Architecture and Interior Design creates the space.
Lighting shapes how people experience it.