7 Tips to Increase Natural Light In Your Living Room

The living room is one of the most wholesome areas in your home. It’s where you sit with guests, enjoy your favorite films, and spend time with the family. By nature, living rooms are among the comfiest places you can be in your house and coziness is the ethos of what this room is all about. One of the most important determiners in how cozy a room can get is lighting.

While artificial lighting is always going to be there and is a mandatory aspect of any interior, what many homeowners tend to overlook is the importance of natural lighting. Even if you have perfectly functioning and bright artificial lighting, this does not mean that there is no use for natural lighting in your living room. There are many benefits to having natural lighting in your interior, from having a positive impact on your body to accentuating and brightening up various elements of your living room interior.

This is why there are several methods on how to increase natural light in the living room so start thinking about which of these options work best for you. 

1. Reflective Surfaces

Using Reflective Surfaces and Decor to Brighten Things Up

As you probably already know, light travels at a set path and gets reflected off various surfaces. This is what makes rooms bright, as the light bounces from one surface to another, illuminating the area. However, if the surfaces it bounces off of are not very reflective, the light is going to diminish at a faster rate and won’t spread as easily. You can strengthen the light by giving it surfaces it can easily reflect off. This includes mirrors, glass, and other shiny surfaces that allow for light to bounce around and reach all corners of the room.

To implement this, try using some glass furniture or even glass walls. Create an accent wall with some reflective decor, such as a set of small mirrors or even bright tiles on the walls. Reflective objects are also known to make the room feel larger than it is, so there are more advantages to having them than simply brightening up the room. Just don’t overdo the reflective surfaces as you don’t want to blind your guests every time they enter your living room. 

2. Panoramic Windows

Enjoy the Views and the Extra Sunlight All Thanks to Panoramic Windows

Windows are the main entryway for natural light. This is why the more windows you have in the room facing the direction of the sun, the brighter and warmer they tend to be. To maximize this effect you can try installing panoramic windows if your living room walls will allow for it. Now, there is a catch with panoramic windows. Since glass is not as heat retentive as your external walls would be, this does mean that you will need to get glass panes with a high U value, which is how heat retention is measured. This does mean that you may need to spend more energy on heating the room, but if your HVAC system can accommodate this, you should have no problems with panoramic windows.

Panoramic windows do have a set of advantages. As you would imagine, they let in significantly more light than your standard windows thanks to how much bigger they are. So even in the winter, when there is limited sunlight, it is not only exposed to more light but can even get warmed up thanks to the rays penetrating through. Additionally, panoramic windows can open up into a beautiful view of the outside world, potentially bringing in more natural elements into your interior. 

3. Metallic Finish On Furniture

How Certain Furniture Pieces Can Brighten Up Your Living Room Interior

Remember how reflective surfaces would brighten up a room by reflecting and refracting sunlight? Well, another great way to incorporate more reflective surfaces into your interior is by having furniture that has some metallic parts and components. These need to be shiny and polished, so brushed metal surfaces, which are very popular with modern interiors, may simply not work.

The metallic components of your furniture don’t need to be anything too complicated. A little accent like a metallic sofa arm panel is subtle, but quite a practical way to increase the brightness in the living room. If you happen to have a glass coffee table, consider replacing its muted wooden frame with a polished metallic one. While these seem like small steps on the surface, they are very effective ways to increase natural light in the room. 

4. Brighter Flooring

The Advantage of Having Brighter Flooring

The floor is one of the biggest surfaces in your living room. This means that it’s going to be carrying out a large chunk of the light reflection in your interior. So it’s important to ensure that the floor is also bright in some way to increase the amount of light it can reflect. It’s easy to put very little consideration into your flooring and go with whatever option comes to your attention first, be it a dark carpet or black marble tiles that look very sleek, but don’t brighten up the room.

To make sure your floor reflects as much sunlight as possible, brighten it up in a few ways. First of all, if you have carpeting, make sure it’s a brighter color. Try to make it light beige, as it is bright enough to reflect light but also muted enough to not be overbearing on the eyes. Or if you have dark wooden or marble flooring, opt for a bright and fluffy rug instead. 

5. Make Use of Grey

The Surprising Magic of the Color Grey

Muted colors are quite popular and for several reasons, one of the biggest ones being that they create a very serene and peaceful atmosphere that does not hit you over the head with color and detail. Now, this isn’t to say that having a colorful interior is always a problem, but for a living room, where you’re going to be doing a lot of relaxing, having bright colors might conflict with the serenity you’re trying to create.

Grey is the perfect color in this case. It is just muted enough so that it is not too bright, which tends to be the case with pristine white interiors. Too much brightness can be very distracting for the eyes. And on the other hand, it’s also not too dark like black, which does not reflect any sunlight whatsoever. Grey rides that perfect line between the two extremes and knows how to increase natural illumination in the living room without being distracting or a burden on the eyes. 

6. Doors With Windows

How Doors Can Help Bring In Natural Light

Interior and exterior doors are also great options for having more natural light in the living room. Now, if possible, you could try an open floor living room plan which circumvents the problem of having doors block out sunlight entirely. But if this layout is not possible, your next best solution would be to install doors that allow light to pass through them.

Windowed doors, be they interior or exterior, have been used for ages and are still quite popular today. Modern glass panes with high U value are heat retentive which means you don’t have to worry as much about insulation with windowed doors. There are also ways to make the glass less transparent if you don’t want to sacrifice your privacy for the sake of introducing more natural light into the living room. And naturally, as with any transparent or reflective surface, the windowed doors allow for more natural light to enter your living room, brightening up the interior.

7. Skylights and Sun Tunnels

Why You Should Have Skylights In Your Home

Let’s finish things off with a slightly larger project that is the be-all-end-all answer to how to increase natural light in the house. Skylights have been around for centuries, especially back when artificial lighting was very limited. After the introduction of electric lighting, people seemed to have dropped the idea of skylights, resorting to something easier to manage and control. But skylights have made a resurgence in recent years and are now quite popular, especially with the rise of sustainable living which asks homeowners to make light more natural instead of simply settling for the artificial fixtures that are often overused.

These are essentially windows that you can put on your roof which allow for more natural light to brighten up the interior of your living room. Alternative skylights include sun tunnels, which are reflective tubes that catch sunlight from a dome that sits on top of the roof and is then reflected onto a light fixture on the interior. Regardless of which one you install, skylights are a great way to brighten up the atmosphere, save money on electricity bills, and make your home more sustainable, three things that any homeowner would consider important when it comes to interior design.