Being green doesn’t mean you can’t have a little style
| Text : Calvin Ando | Photo : courtesy Poca Design |
You know you’re gorgeous because you make an effort to recycle, you shut the lights off when you leave a room and you enjoy a good night’s sleep. Timberland, the footwear company, released a “2010 Timberland Eco-Love Survey” indicating that 25 percent of men would question dating a woman if they knew she didn’t turn the lights off whenever she left home. I’ll come back to having a good night’s sleep shortly, but this Timberland report brings an entirely new meaning to “looking better with the lights off”—and this is exciting!
Hong Kong is teeming with options and is very much an on-demand city. Need a coffee? Go downstairs. Need some sugar? Cross the road. It’s dynamic, it’s convenient, and it is precisely this flexible lifestyle that attracted non-natives to the city. The ability to satisfy our desires and give into our emotions is why we stay.
The multitude of choices Hong Kong offers spans much further than coffee and sugar, to say the least. In this city of possibilities, we get our pick of automobiles, vacation spots, fine restaurants – and lighting. Yes, lighting. I want to discuss how we can use lighting greenly to improve our quality of life inside our homes.
“Green” lighting used to involve buying the cheapest energy-efficient compact fluorescents (CFL) you could find. Nowadays, most of us take a more thorough approach. Lighting starts and ends with flexibility. The ability to feed your moods on-demand and create your inner sanctuary instantly is paramount to being happy and sleeping well in your home (although the other people you live with may matter too). Lighting generally falls into four types: Ambient, task, accent and decorative lighting.
With ambient, green lighting starts with channelling the sun’s rays into the home for strong, ambient lighting. Keep your lighting inconspicuous and if you have low levels of sunlight, think seriously about light reflection in the context of your choice in flooring, walls (mirrors) and paint colour. Everyone has their own colour preferences but what we see most at Poca Design is brighter colours in larger rooms for entertaining and stronger, more evocative colours in thematic or smaller rooms. Task lighting provides illumination for a specific area such as a desk for work or a sofa corner for reading. Accent lighting is dramatic and highlights a particular part of a room such as a painting or piece of art. Decorative lighting is considered a design element and should be loaded with personal attachment. This type of lighting does not give out much light, but it does provide a decorative touch.
A well-lit room generally looks warm and welcoming, but don’t forget the bulbs. Philips has a good line of Ambient LED lights; Sylvania has a nice Ultra LED A-Line (430 lumens, 8 watts). Both options are very energy-efficient. Stick with full-spectrum lights that closely mimic the colour range of sunlight to make everything look better – including you.
Can’t sleep? Install a lighting control system. Not only will these systems turn lights off for you when you leave the room, some systems will change ambient lighting according to the time of day to maximise your energy levels and help you sleep: amber/red in the morning (so you’re half-awake during breakfast and able to stay awake during the day), white or light blue/violet light (if necessary) during the day to stimulate conscious thought and amber/red in the evening again to help you lower your heart rate, get your imagination going and prepare for sleep.
If one of these systems isn’t an option, act as your own light control system and do it yourself! Just remember to turn the lights off. Sleep well, gorgeous.
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