Mid-century homes weren’t built with an excess of wired in and switched light fixtures, and that’s part of their charm! Many of us find our homes a bit too dim for modern living. Fair. But lighting a mid-century home is an art.
Instead of filling every ceiling with recessed can lights (please don’t!), let’s talk about how to layer your lighting for both function and atmosphere.
Here’s a good place to start: the kitchen. As with so many design topics if you get it right in the kitchen you can get it right in the whole house.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Lighting a Mid-Century Kitchen Remodel
The kitchen is the perfect place to plan your home’s lighting because it serves so many functions—food prep, gathering, even a hallway between rooms.
And it’s easy to IMPROVE the light in the kitchen because a classic mid-century kitchen space probably just had a central ceiling light (that casts the shadow of your body against every counter surface) and fluorescent tube lights over the sink and range. NOT GREAT.
Good kitchen lighting includes:
- Soft, dimmable overhead fixtures to set the mood.
- Under-cabinet lighting to illuminate counters without casting shadows.
- Bright (but dimmable) down lights at key work areas like the sink and range
- Eye catching feature lights like pendants over an island or dining table that shine brightness on a surface but also define spaces.
- And lots and lots of daylight. Think about adding a window, borrowing bright daylight from another room by enlarging or creating an opening between them, or cutting in skylights or light tubes!
Get your kitchen lighting right, and you can apply the same principles to the rest of the house!
Questions to ask as you design lighting
How does this room feel at different times of day? And IN EACH SEASON? Is it functional, welcoming, and pleasant.
How does each space feel when you’re in it alone versus when your whole household gathers. Does it have the proper lighting when you have guests?
Remember brighter is not always better. But you do want enough light for every task and activity through the day!
Mood vs. Task Lighting in a mid-century home
Think of your lighting in two categories:
- Mood Lighting (or general lighting) sets the tone for a space and helps you move comfortably through it. This can include warm, dimmable ceiling fixtures, sconces, or up-lighting.
- Task Lighting is for specific activities—reading lamps, pendant lights over a kitchen island, or sconces beside a bathroom mirror.
By layering these two types of lighting, you create a home that feels both functional and inviting.

Hold off on Can lights
My friend, lighting a mid-century house requires ZERO new can lights.
I get it. You’ll hear other advice elsewhere. Many contractors default to installing rows of recessed can lights, but I, personally, hate them in houses. They can lead to a flat, overly bright space that lacks personality. You don’t need your house to feel like a 90’s mcMansion or a corporate office break room.
Install a ceiling surface mount light or two if you need, but you don’t need cans. Instead, use a mix of pendants, floor lamps, and sconces to create a more dynamic, mid-century feel.
Quick design tip for…your front door.
One of the quickest front door or entry updates is new lights! If your mid-century home still has carriage-style sconces or outdated fixtures, swapping them out for a sleek globe or bowtie-style light can instantly modernize your entry. If you don’t have a hardwired fixture in the right place, consider landscape lighting or even a pendant hanging from the soffit for a softer, more welcoming glow.
I’ve collected that, and all my other great front door improvement ideas, in this handy dandy checklist: Perfect your Mid-Century Front Door

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
The Breezeway
Breezeways are one of the most versatile mid-century design elements—part indoor, part outdoor, always charming. Traditionally, they connected the house to the garage, providing a covered but open-air space. Some homeowners have enclosed them for extra square footage, while others enhance them with stylish lighting and seating areas for a cozy, semi-outdoor retreat.
Resources for Lighting a mid-century home
Are Skylights and Light Tubes right for a Mid-century Home
Light up Your Mid-Century Yard (with Ginkgo Leaf Design)
Hip Haven (one of my fave lighting choices)
Sazerac Stitches (a go to for gloriously colored mid mod pendants)
Read the Full Episode Transcript
So good lighting is an absolutely essential part of a well designed space, but many mid century homes don’t come with a lot of lighting wired in in that era, choosing your lights went along with choosing your furniture or art. It was part of personalizing the house.
That means that today you need to make lighting your mid century home a priority of any remodel, and also that you can improve the lighting in your home without calling a contractor. So I’m going to give you some solid advice on creating the right lighting options for any time or task in your mid century home. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mount remodel.
This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 2004 I’m going to start in the kitchen, as we talk about lighting choices for a mid century home, because the kitchen is the heart of any mid century update. If you get the kitchen right, you can pretty much apply the style guide, the layout, all the design decisions that you make there, to every other part of your home.
Also, if you can nail the complexity of a kitchen remodel, you can remodel any part of your house. And the same is true for lighting, because the kitchen is used for so many different purposes. It’s for food preparation. For the first glass of water in the morning.
It’s for the last dishwashed In the evening. Also it’s a social hub in the layout of most mid century homes. And it’s also a hallway. It’s a way you go from one part of a house to another. It has a lot of different lighting situations, and therefore we can talk about all the different lighting needs that your whole house might have by focusing on the kitchen.
Then we’ll go room by room. But before I get into how to tune up the lighting of your mid century kitchen and the rest of your house, I wanted to talk about the bigger picture of your kitchen. Again, it’s so important to get the kitchen right, to preserve whatever mid century charm is there, or put it back if someone else has come in and sort of like scraped out the kitchen of the original house and put in one from the 70s, from the 80s, from the 90s, from five minutes ago.
If you get the kitchen wrong, you or the next owner will be climbing the walls wanting to plan a replacement remodel in less than 10 years. Trendy remodels don’t last. You want to make timeless choices that are nonetheless very specific to your home and to your family, but how do you know you’ll nail it?
This is piled on top of the fact that mid century kitchen layouts have an extra level of challenge. They were designed to be used in a way that is not how we use them today. They were designed for one person to produce food and deliver it to the whole household, and now kitchens are designed for the whole family to hang out in, to co cook together, for multiple cooks to work at once.
The floor plan of a mid century kitchen just doesn’t line up with the lives we lead today. The kitchen is an area that nearly everyone wants to improve on. I talk about this exhaustively here on the podcast, on Instagram, and in every conversation I ever have with anyone about their house directly.
How do you get the kitchen right? If you’re really serious about a great kitchen update for your house in the near future, keep on listening to the episode. There’s going to be a lot of useful advice here for you, but also pick up your phone right now and go save a spot for yourself at next Saturday’s mid century kitchen clinic. I have now given the mid century kitchen clinic three times before. It’s a real tradition, and it’s one of my favorite parts of our calendar.
We spend two hours on a Saturday morning this year, it’s gonna be February 8, talking through the why and the how of a great kitchen remodel, the finishes you should pick for your house and your taste, the layout improvements you should consider based on the house you already have, the way you’ll tune the house to fit your life, the way you live now, and the way you want to live in your home.
And the next steps to take you into that kitchen tweak or that kitchen transformation. It’s not a two hour lecture. I want you to follow along and make some choices for your kitchen as we go. We won’t be delivering this clinic again live until next year, so go sign up now and save your seat at mid mod midwest.com/clinic or hit the show notes page.
I am all kitchen all the time right now in my brain, if you’re paying attention to what’s going on on Instagram, everything I’m talking about there is kitchens and well, it would be false to say that I’m not always thinking about kitchens, because nearly every master plan I do is kitchens. Most of the questions that we get in the ready to remodel, office hours calls have to do with kitchens.
Kitchens are the heart of your home. Before we get into lighting for your mid-century home and your mid century kitchen, let’s give our helpful resource of the week. Your design tip of the week is going to be about how to choose and improve lighting around your front door, also a very important part of your house, like a kitchen in a different way.
It’s your entree, it’s your first look. It’s your Hi, I’m home feeling it’s your face to the street. While we’re on the subject of lighting, one of the best places to make a quick, positive change around your mid century house is right at the front door, and it’s never the wrong time to turn up the style on your entry area and. And to make small improvements, often substitution replacements, and that’s exactly what I recommend you do around the lighting at your front door.
Odds are that your front door has a light fixture already hardwired into it. There’s probably either a sconce light on the wall, maybe a pair of sconce lights, one on either side of the door, and or a landscape light on a post outside. Odds are also that whatever lighting is currently around your front door is not giving quite the vibe that you’re looking for right now, many mid century houses were not built ever to be mid century modern.
They were set up to be more mid century traditional. My own ranch house is an example of this. When I moved into it, it had very sort of Victoriana style carriage lamps for both the post light in the yard and mounted to the wall on either side of the door. It also had a white painted rail fence and a wrought iron hammered set of house numbers and mailbox. None of this was the mid mod vibe I was going for.
So I knew instantly I wanted to turn the dial forward, same moment in history, looking forward, not backwards, Mid Century Modern, not mid century traditional. So the first couple of things I did to my house were exterior upgrades. I switched out the light fixtures.
This rewiring project is not for a total beginner, if you’ve never rewired anything before, I don’t recommend that you do that, but you can call a handyman to come switch out a new light fixture for yourself with relatively little trouble and expense, or educate yourself. This is the sort of thing that you can figure out how to do with a couple of YouTube videos, as long as you are always careful to turn off the breaker power to the light fixtures that you want to rewire. Give it a shot.
When you’re making substitution upgrades to your light fixtures at your entry, you want to think about simplifying the details of the lights. I think you can never go wrong with a globe style light one with an opaque or with a frosted glass style so it’s not showing off the bulb inside. Or if you want to go a little more jaunty, you could choose a bow tie style of light globes also work great for a post light if you have one.
These are the sort of things that you can look on Etsy. You can look frankly, you can look on Home Depot. You can look on any build.com any online light source is going to have options that will bring you more into the mid mod style. Now you can also add light around your front door with landscape lighting. For that, I’m going to point you backwards to Episode 1806 where I talk with landscape designer Jim drieswicki of ginkgo leaf studios, all about landscape lighting around your yard, but this can absolutely help you bring some great light to your front door.
And if you’re going to go a little bit farther, for people who have not enough light and not enough space around their front door to get a light in the right place, sometimes you need to do a bit more extreme rewiring. This can often be tied in with a remodel, and think about hanging a pendant light to be exactly where you want it to be, particularly if you have a brick or stone element of exterior wall around your front door, and you don’t want to be drilling through that in order to mount new wall mounted lighting. Think about hanging a pendant light from a soffit.
Again, a globe might be exactly the right choice for that. As you think about tuning up your front door. Grab that checklist of mid mod front door update ideas. Every step around your front door is important, and some of them can be accomplished in a few hours. Some may take a bit more time and planning, but if you work your way through the possibilities on my front door face lift list, you will end up with a front door that you love. Get that at the link in my show notes, and you’ll find that, of course, at mid mod, dash midwest.com/ 2004,
all right, let’s get into our main topic, lighting your mid century home. Now, as I said, this is a question I get a lot. I’m constantly being asked, How do I solve this lighting problem? That lighting problem, people often think of it as a specific area in their house that has a lighting problem, or a specific problem with their own mid century home that has a lighting problem, but this is to the extent that we think of it as a problem.
It is. It is a challenge baked into the idea of lighting a mid-century home, because in the mid century era, for several reasons, there were just not a lot of hardwired lights in a house. Most mid century houses have wired in that’s switched lights in the bathroom, sometimes just one, sometimes two, in the kitchen, a surface mounted light in the middle of the ceiling and a light at the sink and the range, usually a light by the front door, but sometimes not another wired light in the entire living room area, usually one pendant or ceiling mounted light in a dining room, one ceiling mounted light in The center of each bedroom.
And often that’s it. So that seems like did people just live in the dark and mid century era? No, not at all. The reason that this was the case was it was just a habit in that era to consider lighting as part of the furnishings. It was part of the personalizing choices that you made for your home. And people lived with a lot of different plug in lights.
Pendants suspended from specific parts of the ceiling in order to create and define little light pocket areas in living spaces, floor mounted but floor lamps all over the house, table lamps, sometimes floor mounted lamps with tables in them, post lamps that went from floor to ceiling and kind of defined an area and all sorts of little task lighting.
All of these things are actually choices we can come back to. You can look for vintage light fixtures in any antique store and either just set them up with new bulbs and go, or think about taking them to an electrician or a lamp shop to have them rewired if you feel like you’d like them to be put on a dimmer or have a different kind of switch or be updated in any way, but we can absolutely just go source lights from the mid century era, and it’s a great way to add vintage authenticity back into a house that perhaps has had a lot of modern choices made for it.
First, there was also another reason behind the lack of a lot of hard wired lighting, and that was just mid century, houses were built quickly, simply and with the least costly materials put into them at the time because there was a housing crunch on, and they were just in the habit of turning out Minimum Viable houses that people could improve on later.
So it was really part of the process of sort of moving into your starter home with probably hand me down furniture, and then you could really signal to the world that you had arrived. If you could buy a whole set of furniture, a bedroom set of furniture, a living room set of furniture, and it might come with matching sofa chair and tables of several shapes in the same finish and light fixtures that all go together and all become part of a family.
But that was it was it was part of the sort of save up and spend as you have the money philosophy of the mid century home ownership as well, regardless of the reasons why it’s a situation that exists that we need to deal with. So lighting a mid-century home is a challenge that we all have to take on.
And when we think about lighting, I want you to think about lighting a mid century home in two ways, planning for two types of light, mood lighting or general lighting, and task lighting. More on this in a moment, but I’m gonna basically walk you through different parts of the house.
We’ll start in the kitchen, because, as with many design issues, if you can solve your design issue in the kitchen, if you can solve your problem of lighting a mid century home in the kitchen, you can solve it anywhere in the home, and this is true for built ins, for paint colors, for appliances, for layout challenges and for light fixtures.
Once we’ve covered the kitchen, I’ll apply the same kind of theories that we go through in deep on the kitchen to the other rooms in your house, bedroom, living, Hall, bathroom, office, entry, outside briefly. But for that, I recommend you actually just go check out that landscape lighting episode, which, again, was 1806, so we’ve got two kinds of lighting scenarios that we’re dealing with, general mood lighting and task lighting. Another way to slice lighting in a mid century home is natural versus artificial light.
Now natural light is daylight from the Sun that comes in Windows and many mid century homes have great daylight at certain times of day coming into rooms that have big picture windows, maybe walls of floor to ceiling glass, if you’re lucky, if you’ve got a high drama mid century home, a mid mod home, but one way or another, there’s some daylight in basically every room of a mid century house.
This was an era when the building code required, we had to have daylight in every bedroom. We needed to have light and vent in every bathroom. Now it can sometimes be possible to replace natural light and ventilation in bathroom spaces with artificial light and fans that are artificial ventilation, but in lighting a mid-century home, you’re going to find decent quality daylight in every room in the house. Daylighting always, to me, falls under the category of the general or mood lighting. It’s rarely the best task lighting.
Well, it can be, but it’s not going to be directed to the spot where you’re going to do a task. You might move a task to a spot where you have good daylight, but if we’re thinking about the way a room should be planned, we’ll sort of take our day lighting as a gift of what exists in the house, and then think about how to improve it under the category of general.
So the general the mood light is the light you need in the space to just exist in it, to move through it, to not bump into the walls and furniture, to feel that the house is alive and occupied. You might have just a few dim lights in every space in the house that are on when you’re home or in the social spaces, perhaps during the evening, the bedroom lights and the bathroom lights and anything downstairs are all off.
But you might not only have a light on in the room you’re in, actually, that’ll depend on your upbringing. I can definitely think about my father going through the house just switching off lights. This is wasting energy, and it is. I also lived in a cooperative housing unit in college where all the lights had little post it notes next to the switch that said, I’m powered by burning coal.
Which is true in Madison, Wisconsin, or certainly was true on campus at that time, but it still nice, and if we’re going to use, you know, low energy lights, LED light sources, we can afford to have a little bit of light on in most of the rooms in the house, the social spaces in the house, in the evening hours when we are awake, we also just want to have a little bit of light on regardless of what task we’re doing, even if we’re watching television. We want a mostly dark room.
We don’t want a completely dark room, unless you’re going for that sort of movie theater vibe. If you’re eating dinner, you might want to have the bulk of the light focused on a dining table, but still, you don’t want to be sitting in a completely darkened space. So your mood lighting is going to be for moving about the space, general stuff. It can also be on the bright end. I like to make sure general lighting is on a dimmer whenever possible.
When it’s wired in general lighting is also generally going to be your wired in lighting and the occasional plug in pendant. But you can use general lighting for things like unusual occasions, like packing or searching for a lost object or cleaning. At night, when it’s dark outside, you can make a bright surface by turning all the dimmers up to high.
Or you can make a subtle calm lighting by turning all the dimmers down to low. When you’re thinking about this kind of general lighting, we’ll talk about it specifically in a kitchen. In a kitchen, you’re you’re going to start with your general light being natural light. Windows. Have you got one? If you don’t have one window in a kitchen, something
terrible has happened in a past remodel, but you probably have one window on one exterior wall in a kitchen. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ve got two facing on the same wall, or two on different walls on a corner. I like to look for an opportunity to add more windows to a kitchen. This might mean removing upper cabinets and replacing that wall surface with window.
Or it might be you’re going to bring in more daylight in another way, with a skylight with a light tube, or by borrowing light by opening up between the kitchen and another space. Whenever you have a room that’s lacking in daylight, think about how you can borrow light from an adjacent, brighter room, and this is particularly true in a ranch house that’s organized in a long line pattern where it’s got its short end facing south, so that you have an East Side, long side of the house and a West Side, long side of the house.
It can be that some mornings and evenings are very different vibes in terms of light, and it can really shift the mood of how you want to be in the house at different times of day, in the case like that, where you’ve got strong morning or evening afternoon light drawing you to one side or the other. See if you can open up some spaces across that central spine of the house to borrow daylight from one part of the house to another. But we’re talking about how to add wired in lighting to a mid century home today, generally.
So when we’re thinking about general lights, we’re thinking about service mounted ceiling lights. Maybe we’re thinking about can lights, although I’m going to go a little on a little rant about can lights at the end of the episode. Save up for that. We’re thinking about pendant lights. Perhaps they can be general or they can be task oriented, and we’re just looking for the lights that don’t shine on any particular area or job of work, but are just creating a general vibe into space.
And then, of course, there’s task lighting in a kitchen. Task lighting is shining onto a work surface. So it’s going to shine onto the sink, it’s going to shine onto the stove. It’s going to shine onto an island, any kind of chopping surface, prep surface, it’s going to shine into storage areas, like in a pantry or maybe on the inside of cabinets, it’s going to let you do a specific thing.
Some task lights only serve one purpose when you open up the cabinet and there’s a light inside the cabinet, that light doesn’t do anything for you when the cabinet door is closed. But there’s also a way to sort of bridge between let one light fixture serve as both general and mood general and task lighting. For example, I love under cabinet lights for this on a dim setting.
It’s a down light that never shines in your eyes, that can be set to a warm, low setting and give you just enough room to maneuver the kitchen to do simple tasks like wash a dish or two, pour yourself a drink, walk through the room.
Because many mid century kitchens are hubs, it’s common to have a low light in on them at all times during the dark hours when someone in the household is awake and under cabinet, lights are great for that, because they never shine in your eyes, but they also are excellent task lights.
They shine right down onto the surface you’re working on, and they don’t have any shadow created by for example, the sort of McMansion philosophy of kitchen lighting is can lights that sort of wrap around the walking aisles of a space. So you often have can lights between in the space between a wall, engaged counter and an island, and then pendulums over the island. But if you just use the can lights every counter surface you stand at, you’re creating a shadow with your own head on the work that you’re doing.
It’s chaotic and crazy, and it really frustrates me, that same effect of creating a shadow with your body on the surface you’re working at is also a common problem of the mid century kitchen setup, which the mid century kitchen hardwired and lighting in a never touched Time Capsule house is probably a. Central ceiling light and a light over the kitchen sink and a light over the range or stove top.
When you stand at any counter surface that’s not the sink or the stove, that central light behind you in the middle of the room shadows the work that you’re trying to do so frustrating. So under cabinet lights are something I recommend you add to your kitchen, regardless of whether you’re taking on a big remodel, you can do plug in under cabinet lights that track back to outlets that are available against the wall.
Or for a really cheap, quick hack, if you just want to solve this problem right now, order a set of fairy lights from Amazon. Or you can, I like a kind you can get and the Ace Hardware brand, if you put fairy lights into the search and they’re the kind of lights that are just little LED glass globules on a wire. And if you look at them directly, they’re a little bright, but they’re never going to blind you. And you can run them underneath the cabinets in your house, plug them into the wall.
You can get a battery operated kind you can operate with little remote. I personally prefer the kind that has a little click button that you have to go touch in one place, but then you don’t lose a little remote. And I’ve done this in my own kitchen because the lighting in there is original. I’ve got the central ceiling light and what were two fluorescent lights over the sink and range, I recently replaced those with LED strip lights.
And I cannot tell you how dumb I felt that it took me so long to get around to making that replacement. It was like seven years of living in my house before I switched that out living in a darkened kitchen because I didn’t want to use the fluorescent lights and the central surface light I happened to know and talked to all my clients about how ineffective it is for any work surface.
But those plug in fairy lights actually are a really lovely solution, and they’re what I tend to leave on in the kitchen at all times. They don’t use a lot of power. They don’t make a very bright light. But you can walk into the kitchen to do whatever you want without having to flip on another light switch. But when you’re thinking about task lighting, the other options for kitchens.
So we’ve got under cabinet lights, or, if you don’t have wall cabinets, under shelf lights, same thing we can do Pendant Lights, pendant lights suspended over the working surface, so maybe along a wall, shining down on a wall, engaged base cabinet, or maybe in the center of a room, along a peninsula or an island. Pendant Lights, in this case, can do a couple of things for you.
One, they provide light. Two, they shine it onto a specific surface. But three, they also create a lower ceiling threshold that kind of defines a space. You can define the space in daytime with the physical object of the light itself. And I’m gesturing to the room, and you can’t tell, but anyway, I should do an interpretive dance about how to light your kitchen.
But they also create a pool of light under each pendant that creates a warm, focused, bright space to work at, the counter surface where you want to be. You can also think about task lighting, as I said, inside of cabinets. Lighting up, particularly a pantry cabinet that opens up, might have light inside of it, just like when you open your refrigerator, it has a light inside of it that serves a task.
It lights the thing you’re doing right then, and nothing else. Another plug in light that was common in a mid century kitchen was a swing arm light that would mount on the wall and swing out over the kitchen table, a free standing table that was in sort of open floor plan of an L shaped wall, counter kitchen, one way or another.
Whether or not you’re getting into a big kitchen remodel right now, you can improve the caliber of lighting in a mid-century home by putting in some easy, big box store under cabinet lights. These can be wired in or or plugged in, depending on how far you want to go with the remodel. You can put in some plug in swag Pendant Lights in key areas over a central work surface, over any eat in or dine in space that you’ve got over any seating area, over an entry storage area.
Anything you can do to supplement the sort of big light, this may be my neurodivergence popping out, but avoid the big light is a central theme for me in how to think about a space being really pleasant. That task lighting is the actual light you use when you’re using a space, particularly in the kitchen.
You’re mostly going to be getting light on your working your kitchen, your food prep, your eating with task based lighting. If you’re planning for this to be little tweaks to the kitchen you already have right now, these are mostly going to be plug in solutions, plug in pendants, plug in under cabinet, lights in a remodel, most of these lighting types, whether they’re pendants, whether they’re under cabinet, lights, whether they’re new central lights, if you’re putting in a few can lights, lights at the sink, lights at the range, are all going to be wired in.
So you’ve got to think about the question of light switches. How many switches are too? Many switches this? This is kind of a question for you and for your family. If you’re the kind of person who really likes to micromanage things, you want an array of switches, you might find it helpful to put labels on them, get a print label printer and put them on there for guests as well, especially if you’re also playing with three way switches, which is what we refer to a switch that has two light switches for the same light.
Light in two different locations, perhaps at the door that connects the kitchen to the rest of the house, and the door that connects the kitchen to the mud room, the garage or to the outside. If you want to have a light switch in both places and it controls the same light as a three way switch, I recommend putting at least one of those switches on a dimmer and having switches for as many different lighting conditions as you can stand to before you have a bank of switches that makes you feel like you’re about to plan the moon landing.
This is going to let you micro create the right lighting effect for every kind of activity, for doing the dishes at night, for making a family meal, for one person, putting food together, for breakfast, soothing time, you know, whatever the tone of time you want to spend in a space, you want to have a light condition for that space.
So now take this knowledge we have general or mood lighting for when you want to occupy a room generally, or task lighting for when you want to do something specific in a room and apply it to other spaces in the house.
That third condition that’s more rare when you’ve lost something or when you’re deep cleaning in a time when it’s dark outside, you can generally solve that problem by turning on all of the general and task lights at once that’ll generally throw enough light around the room to get done what you need to get done other spaces in the house may be solved with much less hardwired lighting. In a bedroom, for example, you probably just need one general switched light, although you might want some switched outlets so that you can control your locational lights from walking into the room.
Think about the conditions that you personally and your household experience in your bedroom. You might be a person who just goes in there to sleep and that’s it. You might get dressed in the bathroom.
Or you might do everything else in the bathroom, but you might also dress yourself, read, watch TV, clean, fold laundry, have deep, late night conversations with your spouse or partner in a bedroom.
So think about the different light moods that you need for those things, and how particularly right now in the winter, it’s a good time to set up for that. In the summer, lighting kind of takes care of itself. You might think about blackout shades as a kind of anti lighting a mid-century home solution how to create darkness.
But when you’re lighting a mid century home in the bedroom, you’re thinking about a general overhead light, and at least bedside light by each side of the bed, perhaps also a reading light, a light near a closet or dressing area, perhaps lighting inside of a closet that could be brighter it might open and turn on, or you might want to have the ability to sort of open the closet quietly while someone else is sleeping, and not have the lights come on.
So thinking about what’s convenient for you and what allows you to have the most control over behavior hallways you need to get safely from place to place. You want them to invite you to move around the house. So you need one or several general ceiling lights.
You might also want to have a low baseboard light, or even just a plug in light that gives you a dim light in the middle of the night. You also want to think about though a brightness that invites you in hallway is a great place to put in some light tubes to bring daylight into a central, often dark corridor part of the house. It’ll help draw you out of bedrooms in the morning, into the social spaces and draw you towards the bedrooms in the evening, a little bit of moonlight in the hallway can be a really imaginable thing.
Also in the bedroom wing, there’s bathrooms. So here’s where you want to think about your morning condition versus your evening, maybe a light that brightens and wakes you right up in the morning, so you start to jump into the awake time of the day, versus the ability to have very low lights to simmer down at the end of the night, or even just in the evening.
You want to think about, in many bathrooms, having the ability to have quite bright light for doing makeup, for checking in on what is that spot for any kind of personal care issues, and you want to make sure that light, ideally, is not happening over your head again, just like in a kitchen, we’re avoiding a light where you cast a shadow with your own head.
A light in the bathroom that’s centered over your look in the mirror is probably going to cause your nose to cast shadows on the side of your face. So you ideally want to have two wall mounted or in a small bathroom. One of my favorite tricks is two pendant lights that hang on either side of the mirror spaces.
If you’ve got two vanities and two mirror stations, you might do three pendant lights or three sconces that give you side by side light for each person that’s relatively equally spaced from that center point where you tend to look at yourself in the mirror. Another absolute wonderful solution in a bathroom is under cabinet lights, either at the kick plate, or if you do wall mounted cabinets in a bathroom, which I highly recommend, you can do a ring of lighting underneath the whole wall mounted cabinet that points downwards.
This is great for if you’re coming into the bathroom to get a glass of water in the night, to care for a sick kid, to just go to the bathroom. You don’t have to have light flashing up into your eyes. It can be a nice way to sort of have a dim move around light. It’s also the kind of light that you can leave on in the evening to, again, kind of like draw you into the bedroom wing towards bedtime as part of the simmer down.
And night routine, you might want to think about an overhead light in a shower space. This should be moisture proof, of course, and could be paired with a ceiling fan. But in general, I’m not a big fan of putting a lot of lights into the ceiling of a bathroom. I want to see them closer to eye line in as many places as possible, or down below our eye surface, in that base kick plate or under cabinet place.
If you’re nowhere near a bathroom remodel, though, you might be saying, okay, della that’s great. That’s those are the things I’ll do when I remodel my bathroom. But what do I do right now? You like me, are probably looking for more of a quick fix solution. I have, from a lighting perspective, a time capsule bathroom. Some bad choices were made in the 90s in terms of vanity, but we’ve got one switched light and one outlet plug in the bathroom.
I’ve dedicated one of the two plugs in that outlet to a plug in night light. I use a casper brand. It’s kind of esthetically pleasing and sort of moon shaped. It’s dim all the time whenever there’s no other light in the space, but when you walk into the room, it brightens up just slightly. So it’s really nice. If you go in there, I brush my teeth to it in the evening.
It’s just a very soothing Hey, you’re going to bed light. And it’s also nice in the middle of the night, other spaces around the house that are probably going to need some lighting. The Office, I have a whole podcast on this, so let me just point you to Episode 1910, from last December. And I talk about lighting as one of the components of a great office tucked into a mid century home.
The entry in your formal entry, or your mud space, you are going to need some wired and light again. Dimmers are your friend. You want to be able to turn it up bright if you’ve dropped something, if you’re looking for something, if you’re getting out in the middle of a evening and everything is black out, but also you want it to be a gentle, welcoming space for the most part.
I think it can also be really possible to improve a space like that with low lighting, putting lighting around a shoe area, kick plate lighting can be a really good choice for an entry or a mud space.
And there’s not a one size fits all solution for this. This is something you’re going to think about personally as you consider your household, your family. What kind of light do you need when? How bright should it be? How many different locations does it need to spotlight? Do you want to have an angled spot pointing at each person’s coat hook to kind of psychologically direct each person to their own Cubby, to their own space where they should hang up their own stuff that might be worth having some wired lights put in.
Some can lights that direct to a specific place in the ceiling. Or you might want to just think about an esthetically pleasing pendant light that hangs from a corner over a reading chair or a bench in that space to sort of say like, Hi. This is a warm space. It needs a dim light. This is the mood creation light that also helps you tie your shoelaces as you get out the door in the mornings, in a living room, in a den, in any social space in your house, this is where I most want you to resist the pressure from contractors to fill a remodeled space with can lights.
Instead create gentle, general lighting with concealed Cove lights that point upward and wash the ceiling or walls, turning any white painted surface into part of a light fixture. For spaces with standard eight foot ceilings, any kind of up facing light, a floor lamp can help create the impression of a higher space.
And if you’ve got a higher ceiling space, if you’re lucky enough to have exposed beams or something like that, nature, washing those lights that space with light can help emphasize it and draw your eyes up. But you’re basically going to be thinking about adding plug in or wired in pendant lights to a lot of living room spaces to make them work properly.
Floor lamps can be a great solution. If you’re know that you’re gonna be having floor lamps in your remodeled space, you might actually ask them to wire in a few outlets at key locations in the floor so you’re not trailing wires all the way across. But with ceilings, you’re just going to nicely swag a cord across the space and let the pendant light hang down.
I’m actually a big fan of swagged plug in pendant lighting, or even swagged wired in pendant lighting, rather than planning the exact spot where the pendant light should hang and getting your surface mount right into the ceiling in that spot, that does not give you a lot of room to, for example, over a dining table, bring in a sideboard, and need to shift the table over slightly to one side so it’s no longer symmetrically centered in the room.
If you’ve hardwired a ceiling light to hang a pendant in the center of the room, you’re kind of out of luck there. But if you hardwire a ceiling light at an off center corner location and plan to swag the pendant over to hang in a specific spot, that gives you the freedom to adjust the location, same for creating a pendant light space over a coffee table in the center of a sitting area, for a specific reading nook corner.
I’m a huge fan of pendant lights and living spaces because they can be not only a light source but a beautiful sculptural object during the daytime when they’re off, and they can help define space that creates. Creates a more restful Be Here Now moment than just the general openness of an eight foot high or certainly a higher ceiling space.
The same is absolutely true in a dining area, anywhere you’re going to sit down and eat in an eat in area in a dining room, whether it has a high ceiling or a low one, you want to create a low space that’s designed for the seated people at the table to have kind of an artificial ceiling created with light right above their heads.
So you probably want to have a pendant light hanging three feet or only a little bit more, above a table surface, or above a counter surface that you’ve got sort of a lowered, defined area that brings everybody in and has them gather at that central dining space where the rest of the room is more dimly lit.
You know, what are the other important activities that take place in your living room, in your den, in your social area? Do you need to create specific task lighting for reading, for doing puzzles, for doing a craft, for watching television, for doing a craft while other people in the household are also watching television, but you’re not blinding them with your lights.
For entertaining, for eating on the couch. Hey, no judgment there. I do this too. For each of these rooms that you’re thinking about lighting a mid-century home, ask yourself, how does that space deal at different times of day and in each season?
How does it feel when you’re in it alone, when your whole household gathers, when you have guests over. It can help to sort of name these times or moods or schemes and make sure you’ve got them all covered. Do you have your morning, wake up and go lighting covered in each part of the house that you touch during that part of your routine? Also do you have your evening, simmer down, settle down, soothe everybody into bedtime lighting covered? And do you have the lighting for when you have a bunch of guests over and you want to throw a big party? For each of these scenarios, you want to have the right fixtures and the right ability to brighten or dim them one way or another. Though you’re going to be choosing light bulbs for a lot of these light fixtures, and when you do that, I urge you to aim towards the warm end of the scale.
Not to get too technical on you with something that you can Google, but this is known as the light temperature, and it’s measured in kelvins. For some odd reason, the cool bluish light is a higher Kelvin temperature. So that’s more like 5,000k 4,000k and the warmer to redder lights are a lower Kevin Kelvin number. 1000 2000 k1, of my favorite brand new technological solutions, is a type of dimmable LED bulb that, as it dims, it tips more towards the warmer lower k values.
This is an absolute revelation from back in the day when you had to choose whether you wanted to just use an incandescent light that could be dimmed or at any G efficient CFL or LED light that could not be dimmed. Now we can have dimmable LEDs, and we can put them into vintage fixtures. So this is really like now we get to have our cake and eat it too moment.
If you’re thinking of, How can I go around my house and improve the lighting scenario right now, think about replacing bulbs in existing fixtures with warm, dimmable LEDs. Think about adding more potentially vintage but certainly fun style fixture pieces that you like to look at that light when it’s off and also it casts the right glow when it’s on.
Lighting can range from very inexpensive and practical to very, very pricey, and sometimes that price differences is associated with quality, but I urge you to just look for simple fixtures that work for your style from relatively affordable sources first, and then maybe think about one or two dreamy accent pieces, the Nelson lamp, the vintage piece you’ve been hunting for that you get on first dibs, that kind of statement piece, but really you can just fill in around your house with relatively mild lighting that solves problems and plugs In and sits out of the way with a little bit of simple cord management.
Remember that lighting a mid century house is a task we have to take on. It doesn’t come for free. It doesn’t come with the house like a modern house, but it’s worth it, because you can really change the entire way you experience your home with the right lighting conditions.
You can make yourself feel more relaxed. You can make yourself want to linger in places you like during the daytime into the evening. You can make it easier to stay off your phone or to create social time for your family by calling people together subtly with the right light fixtures. As we wrap up this episode on lighting, I want to talk a little bit about can lights. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.
I feel like a very common conflict of me and my head and every general contractor everywhere is that they want to put in a whole host of can lights in most spaces in the kitchen, certainly in a living room. Ha. Yeah, in the bedroom, in a bathroom, maybe, but it is way too easy to over light a space with a kind of general flat lighting.
You can look online, if you Google can lights, where to place them, or how to space can lights, you’re going to get advice on how to create a complete general bright lighting scenario across a space by placing can lights in an array that might be as close together as four feet on center.
They’re going to tell you, it depends on your ceiling height. I’m going to tell you, you live in a ranch house with an eight foot ceiling, and you just don’t need that much light. That kind of over lighting can lead to a McMansion vibe, which is not, hi, thanks, Roxy, a McMansion vibe, which is not what we’re looking for, or just sort of a corporate office feeling, which is not at all what you’re looking for in your home. We want to create subtle, warm, encouraging moods. We’re not looking for bright, bright, bright, general lighting.
So I would argue that you do not need a single can light in your house now, if it was remodeled in the past, if any part of your house was updated after probably mid 1980s actually, 80s and 90s, you might end up with a lot of track lighting. That was their favorite solution for under lit houses. Then 90s, early 2000s and on, you’re going to find that your house already has can lights. You don’t have to take them out, but feel free to keep them off at every possible moment, or, yeah, go right ahead and have them removed in the next remodel. I don’t hate that plan.
I was asked recently on an office hours call. And again, my architect Office Hours call are a feature that I do for my ready to remodel students, people who are using the Master Plan method to plan their own home remodels to create their own master plans.
Once a month, we do a live call where people can submit the questions for whatever’s on their mind in their house right now, and I’ll talk that through the pros, the cons, other examples and how they might make the best choices. Recently, someone asked a question of, can lights? How prevalent were pot lights, as they referred to them.
In lighting a mid century home, they said we have many, and they feel wrong. Our house has newer, big box store specials, but I did find a few outside in the breezeway and in the eaves that appear to be original to the house, which is from 1969 were they around in the mid century era? Would they have been used in a kitchen or outside, usually?
So this is a really fun question that I answered for them, and the short version is that, yes, there were can or pot lights in certain mid century homes, but they were not used as today for general lighting. They were used as spotlights. So they often shown at an angle onto art, on a wall, or onto a built in and outside. T
hey might have been used for wall washing, sort of creating an effect to show off the texture of the exterior of the house, but they would never have been used just in an array all over the room for general lighting. I’ll link in the show notes to a couple of really fun examples of houses that have found vintage pot lights or can lights, but you can see in each of these examples, they’re all used to highlight artwork, not to create general room lighting.
I think can lights a violate your ceiling surface, which creates air seal problems, creates insulation problems, just sort of separates that nice boundary between inside space and attic space that we want to be using for cooling and venting. And also, they break up a ceiling surface, if you are so fortunate as to have a hand plastered ceiling that’s still in good condition from a mid century house.
I can tell you today, it’s very rare that craftsmen are still around who have the skill to create those lovely clamshell patterns across the ceiling. We do not want to mess that up with an array of icky looking, Home Depot style can lights. So in general, yeah, I could, oh, I could really, I could really rant. I could show you pictures of spaces that are made so ugly by can lights.
But the long story short is your house doesn’t need these electricians like to put them in because they have been trained to put them in. They have a simple system for putting them in, and they like to feel that they’ve properly lit each room. But you’re not looking for corporate office space lighting in your mid century house.
Lighting a mid century home is about finding the right tone, the right mood, the right style, and so for you to create the right lighting scenario for your mid century home, you are thinking much more about the micro spaces, the times of day, the types of use, and you’re trying to find beautiful pieces, pendant lights, floor lights, lamps that can sit on top of your furniture, and the subtle concealed under cabinet lighting built In lighting under shelf lighting, baseboard lighting that lets you live in your house with relatively little light fixtures coming from the ceiling surface.
In the spirit of good lighting, lighting a mid century home with daylight, I thought our mid century house feature of the week should be a breezeway. This is. It has variable definitions in variable parts of the country. I’ve heard people even refer to it fully enclosed space that’s open to the rest of the house. That’s kind of just an interstitial space between living space and a garage as a breezeway.
To my mind, a breezeway is an exterior area of the house that has continuous roof over it that extends from the house beyond, often connecting the house and garage breezeways done right, can be amazing spaces, this magical moment of indoor outdoor living that can be screened or unscreened, that can really encourage you to flow smoothly out of the house.
They can be a wonderful sock foot area where you can step out and check on something, experience fresh air, decide what kind of coat and scarf and hat you need, or they can be dark and awkward and narrow and sort of cut you off from the rest of the house.
I had a breezeway in my own home between the house and garage, and I pirated it completely for two purposes, one at the front part of the house. First,I took half the breezeway and dedicated it to more garage space for storage. SoI can keep my trash cans and some work surfaces and a little bit of shovels and other kind of storage there and then the back half of the breezeway is now a mud room that connects directly into my kitchen and gives out with a door onto the backyard that Roxy can lay and look out the glass door into the backyard directly.
Since I didn’t have any other doors facing outward, this, to me, was absolutely worth it, because in my house, the breezeway was only six feet wide and it was 24 feet long, so it functioned like a long, low tunnel, even though I had one window in the kitchen and a window in the dining room that gave on to it, so They got a little bit of daylight. It was mitigated. It wasn’t really bringing in the natural light that I wanted.
So I’m singing the praises of breezeways and telling you I got rid of mine, and I’m not sorry, but a breezeway can be a really fun feature, particularly if it gives you a covered space to be outside and to get some privacy from the street while being able to look out at the front or the back part of the house. It can let you run out to the garage. More simply, a lot of breezeways are after the fact additions to mid century houses, because a lot of garages are after the fact additions to mid century houses.
But if you’re giving yourself an opportunity to add one in, it can be something that takes you out from a layered effect, from inside to onto a breezeway, to out onto a deck to out into the yard. That kind of layering can be a really, really pleasant thing to have in the south breezeways were often used to connect two separate living areas, or sort of a sleeping area that was across a dog trot, which was a small breezeway area at the exact width of the house that then had the bedrooms in a separate space so they weren’t getting heated up by the cooking activities in the social part of the house.
In other areas, breezeways are place where you can capture a breeze in a screened area. If you are lucky enough to have one, you can always improve on it by giving it better views, more privacy, making sure that the floor surface is pleasant and as close to the level of the interior space of the house or an adjacent outside space as possible.
And you can also think about pirating a breezeway that you have access to to get yourself a little bit more interior area within the footprint of an existing roofline. Have you got a breezeway in your house? If you do, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re thinking of changing the footprint of your house, would you think about spending your money, your effort, on creating a roofed and, well, floored area that wasn’t actually interior footprint for your house?
Would that be worth it to you at the end of the day, the lines between what is a breezeway and what is a screened porch and what is just extended evelines can sort of blur, but I’ll put some images of fun breezeway examples, some of what I did with my own breezeway, and some mid century house Master Plan breezeways that we’ve played with over the years into the show notes page, if I think of it. So wish me luck with that.
You can find that the transcript of this episode, the links to the mid century kitchen clinic and a bunch of examples of fun lighting that I like on the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/ 2004.
Next week, on the podcast, we’ll be digging into spatial arrangements in mid century kitchens, and how to think about how your kitchen can best serve your family and who is in the kitchen doing what when. But I hope you’ve taken away some really helpful lessons on lighting for mid century kitchens for mid century houses, in general, lighting a mid century house is such a worthwhile endeavor, it’s probably going to take extra work when you move in.
The house does not have enough lighting, but you get to make amazing choices for your home and really tune it to your household, your lifestyle, the life you want to live in your house when you do it right, if you’ve got more questions about fixtures and choices for lighting a mid-century home. I’m realizing right now, I haven’t really talked about the style of light fixtures, the look of light fixtures for a mid century home, just their functionality. So we might have another episode coming up on lighting a mid-century home, the look book. Let me know if that’s something you want to hear about. Catch you next week.