The sun sets in Bristol at five past four on the last day of this month, and at one minute past four on 12 December, which is the earliest it manages all year. On the shortest day we get seven hours and fifty minutes of daylight, and most of that happens while you are at work.
So from now until February you are going to be living in your house mostly after dark, under whatever lighting happened to be fitted when it was built. The flat, faintly cold feeling a house gets in January is usually the light rather than the decoration, and the light is the cheapest thing in a house to change.
Nine things that help, cheapest first. Some of them you will have done already, so skip ahead. The first is free and the next two are nearly free.
Start with the light you already have
Turn the downlights off
Free, and the biggest single change on the list. A ceiling full of downlights lights the floor, the worktops and the tops of everyone's heads, and leaves the walls dark. Bright room, cold feeling, and the walls doing none of the work.
Switch them off in the evening and light the room from table height instead. Two or three lamps will do more for a living room than twelve downlights, because lamps throw light onto the walls, and a lit wall is most of what makes a room feel warm. If your house got a pendant in the middle of the ceiling rather than spots, the one light in the middle of the ceiling makes the same argument at more length.
One small thing while you are at it. Where the bulb is visible in an open shade, an opal one softens the light and takes the glare off it. Clear filament bulbs are lovely and belong in decorative pendants, not at seated eye height.
Read the number printed on the bulb
Colour temperature is measured in kelvin and the figure is on the bulb, or on the box it came in. 2700K is extra warm white. 3000K is warm white. 4000K is cool white, sometimes sold as neutral. Anything from 5000K up is daylight.
Living rooms and bedrooms want 2700K, or 3000K at a push. 4000K is the cooler light that gets specified for kitchens and bathrooms, and if that is what is sitting in your living room ceiling, it is a good part of why the room goes slightly municipal after dark. A set of 2700K replacements is the cheapest meaningful change available to you this winter.
Do one room first. The difference is obvious side by side and almost invisible in isolation, which is the whole trouble with it. And while you are up there, check they all match. A ceiling with three colour temperatures in it never quite settles, and that is what you end up with when bulbs get replaced one at a time.
Fit a dimmer, and get two things right before you do
Taking a living room down to around half brightness in the evening changes it more than anything you could buy for it. Most new builds come with plain on and off switches, so this is a genuine upgrade rather than a tweak, and it is a job for an electrician rather than a Sunday afternoon.
Two things have to line up. The bulbs have to say dimmable on the box, because a non-dimmable LED on a dimmer will flicker, buzz, run hot and fail early. And the dimmer has to be built for LEDs. Older dimmers were designed for incandescent and halogen bulbs and will not behave with modern lamps: the ones you want are described as trailing edge, which suits the electronic drivers inside LEDs. Get either half wrong and you get flickering, or bulbs that die in months.
Then the surfaces that do the most
Do something about the black windows
In summer a big window is the best thing in the room. From half past four in November it is a black panel, and new builds tend to have several of them in a row. Glass gives nothing back to a room at night, so the wall it sits in stops holding the room together and the space reads as bigger, barer and colder than it actually is.
Anything soft across it fixes that, and the fix is immediate in a way that very little else in a house is. If your windows are still bare, that is normal, and the earlier piece covers what to do about it first.
Ask about interlining, not just lining
Worth knowing if you are ordering curtains this winter rather than next summer, because it is the part of the order that otherwise gets decided for you. Lining is the single layer on the back of a curtain. Interlining is a third layer in between, traditionally a soft cotton bump, and it is the difference between curtains that hang and curtains that fall.
It improves the thermal performance, it blocks more light even without a blackout lining, and it absorbs sound, which in a hard-surfaced new build is not a small thing. If your rooms still ring slightly, everything echoes and nothing is broken explains what is going on. Interlining is also simply better to look at. The extra weight gives you deeper folds and a quieter line down the leading edge.
Window treatments are the part of a house most often left until last and most often got wrong. It is also why made to measure curtains and blinds, specified and installed, are a large part of what we do as interior designers in Bristol, and in Bath, Keynsham, Portishead and the towns around them.
Put something warm underfoot, and make it wool
Winter is the season a hard floor stops being a style decision. If you are buying a rug now, buy wool rather than viscose. Viscose has the sheen people want and very little of the resilience: water marks it, and it goes shiny and distorted in patches under even light foot traffic, which in November means wet shoes and a hallway. Wool takes the traffic, resists staining without being treated, and recovers its pile when you move the furniture.
Buy something to go underneath it as well. A felt and rubber pad stops the rug creeping and the edges buckling, keeps the backing from wearing at your floor, adds a bit of cushioning and insulates slightly against a cold floor. The thin waffle sort grips and does little else.
Size matters more than material, and it is the easier of the two to get wrong. What size rug for a living room has the measurements.
Three small moves worth making this week
Put a mirror where it can see a window
There are about nine hours of daylight this week and under eight and a quarter by the end of the month, so it is worth passing round what you do get. Hang the mirror opposite a window, or at right angles to one, and high enough to catch sky rather than fence.
A mirror on the wall facing a dark corner reflects the dark corner. Stand where you will actually sit, and check what it gives you back, before anything goes into the wall.
Light the hall before you light the living room
The hall is the room you walk into in the dark with your hands full, and in most new builds it has one ceiling light, no lamp and nowhere obvious to plug one in. It sets how the whole house feels for the first ten seconds of every evening, which is a lot of work for the space that tends to get left until last.
A lamp on whatever surface exists, or a plug-in wall light if there is no surface, changes the arrival completely. A timer or a smart plug, so that it is already on when you open the door, is the other half of it. That first evening in a new house is about the same ten seconds on a larger scale.
Swap the covers rather than the cushions
The seasonal layer is real, and it does not have to mean buying things twice. Buy covers rather than whole cushions: they store flat in a drawer, and the surface is all you are changing anyway. Heavier weaves where hands and feet land, so wool, a chunky knit, or velvet instead of linen for a few months.
It works because you are changing what the light has to play with. A winter room is not really a different colour. It is a different texture.
And one thing to leave until spring
Paint. If you are choosing colours now, you are judging them in the shortest days of the year and mostly under electric light, and light changes how a colour reads more than any sample card can show you. The shade that looks like a warm stone at four in the afternoon in December can look like putty in April.
If you would rather not wait, there is a way to do it that holds up. Paint the sample onto a piece of card rather than straight onto the wall, move it to each wall in turn, and look at it in daylight as well as after dark with your lamps on before you commit to anything. Then choose the lighting and the colour together rather than one and then the other, because a dark colour needs more light than a pale one and it is better to know that before the walls are done. Paint is the last decision, not the first is the longer version of this.
Otherwise, most of the list above costs nothing or very little. Turn the downlights off tonight and see how far that gets you.
When you want a hand with it
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Stand in the doorway after dark, with the lights on the way you normally have them, and take one photo from there. Tell us three things: what the bulbs in the ceiling say, where the lamps are, and what is at the windows.
We will tell you which of these to do first in that particular room, what to leave until spring, and whether the thing making it feel cold is the light or the lack of anything soft in it. It is almost never the paint. Your house is not darker than it should be. It was lit for a day in June, and nobody has changed it since.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.