14 Ideas to Decorate Your Rooms with Lights and Brighten Up Your Space

It’s impossible for most people to imagine what their lives would be like without artificial light. Now, it is a crucial element not only in the safety and livability of the home, but in its design. Indeed, the quality of a home’s lighting determines how other furnishings and even works of art are experienced. Light allows people to see what is in a room that would be otherwise dark in the middle of the night, such as its size and how its furniture, wall color, flooring compare and contrast with each other. Decorating with lights dramatizes a work of art or highlights a space such as a wall, a fireplace or a flight of stairs with a wash of light.

14 Stylish and Adorable Ideas for Decorating Your Rooms with Lights

Decorative lights, whether they be neon tubes, fairy lights, candles or Edison bulbs can also be installed for no other reason than that they’re fun and pleasurable to behold. Lights can instantly change the atmosphere in a room, and now with the ability to dim lights or even change their color, the atmosphere can be changed from one minute to the next. With the advent of cool, long-lasting and energy efficient LEDs, the way light can be used as decoration is limited only by the imagination.

1. Fairy Lights on the Bedpost

Don’t just bring out the fairy lights for the holidays. Coils of these lights arranged on the bedpost make reading or writing in bed a singular experience. Tiny LED bulbs not only bring a surprising amount of light, but are cool to the touch and last for years without having to be replaced. A pillar candle on the night stand adds to the playful yet mellow atmosphere.

2. Tricks of Light in a White Room

A room lit only by the fireplace, a grouping of pillar candles on the mantlepiece and spotlights aimed at a French window gives a room a feeling that’s both romantic and more than a little mysterious from the play of light and shadow. How, indeed, are those lights doing what they’re doing on the frame of the French window? Only the homeowner knows for sure.

3. Pure Light and Pure White in a Fireplace

If a homeowner has a fireplace that they’re not using, what better way to light it than with a prettily arranged crowd of votives and pillar candles placed on an old tray? The tray protects the floor from drips and keeps the candles together It can be made of ceramic or polished metal to reflect the light.

4. Votive Candles Glow in the Firescreen

One imaginative way to use light is to stick some votive candles in a wrought iron firescreen placed in front of the firebox. Make sure that the firescreen has rings to hold the candles securely. Another nice touch is to place pillar candles among some vintage glassware along the mantel above.

5. Pine Boughs Full of Stars

Arranging garlands of pine needles along the corners and around the doors of a house brings nature into the home for the holidays. Twining them with sparklingLED fairy lights makes them look like stars have come to rest in the green needles. Since LEDs are cool, there’s little danger of fire.

6. Lighting the Way to the Top of the Stairs

A flight of stairs that leads to the attic is made far less spooky by arranging delicate fairy lights around the stair rail. Not only are the lights pretty, but they add a small but needful illumination to an area in the house that may not get much light. They also gently light the stair treads.

7. An Angelic Halo Over a Romantic Bed

Hang a gauze curtain from a halo made of softly glowing light, and let it fall upon a bed made up in delicious, sumptuous bedclothes. The ring itself is attached to the ceiling. This is a bed fit for a sleeping beauty. Again, the lights must be cool to be safe for the draperies.

8. Candles, Twigs and Crystals in a Fireplace

Another amazing thing to do for a fireplace that’s not really being used is to arrange votive candles in holders made out of wrought iron wires and decorated with tiny crystals. It gives the whole scene the feel of a woodland forest in the winter, the bare branches just touched by ice crystals.

9. Lighted Arrow Points Onward and Upward

A rough hewn arrow or other work of rustic art is so much more interesting if it is studded with tiny lights. It’s not only its own art object, but it gives serviceable illumination to the room. Such an object is probably easy to install for a person with basic electrical skills.

10. Simple Light-filled Holiday Arrangement

Take a galvanized bucket, fill it with pine cones, white and gold Christmas tree balls and a bow of golden gauze. Add some fiber-optic twigs tipped with bright lights for a simple yet stunning Christmas arrangement. Placing it in front of a grouping of pale logs such as paper birch gives it some height.

11. Blue Bottle Full of Light

There is a way to get a skein of fairy lights into a plain cobalt blue bottle and light it up. Besides the “How did you do that?” factor, a row of these bottles will have jaws dropping at the sheer beauty of the arrangement. Ask guests what the lights remind them of and the answers might range from a sky full of shooting stars to a bioluminescent coral reef.

12. Is that Rope on Fire?

A person who first sees this light fixture might at first not know what it is. Then, they might be startled, thinking it is a jumble of rope that’s been set on fire. But no, it’s a jumble of rope jumbled with harmless white Christmas lights. It’s just the thing for a person who loves to surprise and enchant when they’re decorating with lights.

13. A Simple Backlit Garland

One of the benefits of LEDs is that they can now be tucked into foliage or fabric and give the impression that the object is lit from behind. It makes a statement of ascetic beauty when the light is added to a simple swag of dried eucalyptus or sage leaves and affixed to a pure white wall.

14. Don’t Forget Neon Lights

Perhaps signs made of neon lights can’t be put just anywhere in the house, but there are places where decorating with lights made of electrified noble gases is just the thing. It might be a home office or the funkier type of teenage bedroom. By the way, neon lights aren’t always made of neon. The colors give the gasses away. Helium glows peach-pink, xenon is pale violet, krypton is bluish white and neon is orange red.