Reading the light

A room has a different character at every hour, and a survey taken at eleven in the morning describes only one of them. This chapter is about the other twenty-three.

Start by doing nothing. Sit in the room at the start of the day and at the end of it, on a clear day and a dull one, and write down where the light falls and for how long. A plan drawn from one visit will put the desk where the glare is and the sofa where nobody can read.

Then look at what the light lands on. Pale walls return it and dark ones keep it, and the same window can make a room feel twice its size or half of it depending on nothing but the surface opposite. Before you move a wall, try changing what it is made of.

Artificial light is the last decision, not the first. Most rooms are lit for the one hour a day the designer visited and for none of the hours the owner lives in them. Choose the fittings after the month of watching, and choose fewer of them than you think you need.

The next chapter is about restraint, which is the hardest of these to learn and the only one that cannot be undone once it is forgotten.