> An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes
indeed. i am unsure where the love for those "spotlights" embedded into the ceiling comes from. every time i enter a room that has them i want to crouch like gollum. the only thing they seem to do is blind you.
indirect lights can be expensive and hard to find though. i built 12 hanging lamps that illuminate the ceiling instead of the floor myself, which saves a few thousand bucks but was unfortunately more work than expected.
Ceiling downlights can me (for most people and most purposes) quite nice, but they need to actually be spotlights. If you have a light that is close to being a point source (very bright per unit solid angle), which includes most lights aimed at people, you want that light to avoid emitting light at an angle that you're likely to be able to see. So a downlight on a ceiling should emit very little light past an angle of, say, 45 degrees or even less from vertical. After all, for most purposes (but not bedrooms when in bed!), you are not looking straight up, and a light that's shining on the top of your head or even on the tops of your eyebrows is not irritating your eyes. But a bright light, shining at you, that's in your field of view when looking horizontally, can be extremely annoying.
The office-style solution is big diffuse ceiling lights. The easy but rather inefficient solution is indirect lighting. The expensive solution is to use high-end architectural lights that have a trim or lens design that makes the light source almost invisible from shallow angles. An excellent and cheap solution is to use highly recessed lights with standard, inexpensive designs. A PAR30S lamp in an ordinary (not "shallow") 5" or 6" ceiling can, with a trim that allows it to be installed at a respectable recess, can work very nicely. (That "S" is important. The whole point is that it's a "short neck" light, so the bottom surface is farther above the ceiling. And the PAR part is important, too -- PARs are reflectors, not floods, and they emit over a narrower angle.)
As far as I can tell, this is almost completely ignored for residential and small business lighting, especially with LED lights from places like Costco and Home Depot. You do not want a bright light that emits over 180 degrees installed in plane with your ceiling.
Doing it with hanging lamps is a clever solution. Doing it indirectly is the goal. There's one company out of the UK making super high end LED diffusers that can be precisely controlled - both the amount of light and the direction. Can't remember the company but it was similar to this: https://www.acalbfi.com/technologies/photonics/optical-compo...
Mind sharing how you made the hanging lamps? I'm currently designing a new house and was thinking of doing a similar setup. Any guidance would be appreciated.
1.) get an appropriate bowl of a form/color you like. the required size differs whether you want to use 1 or 3 led-bulbs. i used this ( https://edelrostshop.de/de-at/products/rost-metall-schale-o-... ) and painted it white (got them to deliver 20 pieces without rust). the bowl should be less than 2 kg. the point here is to face the light exclusively to the ceiling while preventing you ever seeing the light sources directly.
3.) if you want 3 lightbulbs, just screw in a a 3-way splitter ( e.g. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07VH7KKCH/ ). the benefit here is more and more upwards-facing light
4.) the final part is connecting the bowl to the lamp suspension. i just made 4 screws in the suspension and 4 holes in the bowls and connected with basically-invisible nylon strings. getting the nylon strings to be all the same size was tricky but doable.
indeed. i am unsure where the love for those "spotlights" embedded into the ceiling comes from. every time i enter a room that has them i want to crouch like gollum. the only thing they seem to do is blind you.
indirect lights can be expensive and hard to find though. i built 12 hanging lamps that illuminate the ceiling instead of the floor myself, which saves a few thousand bucks but was unfortunately more work than expected.