Bathroom Lighting: the Design

the "rules", metals, floor plans, the works: a must-read before you tackle a bathroom renovation

Bathroom lights in a recent Good Bones project

As in every room, lighting can completely transform the look and feel of your bathroom and is important to consider from the very beginning of a project.

Actually, scratch that.

I’d argue lighting is even more important in a bathroom because, in almost every circumstance, it’s fully built-in and can’t be easily altered. There are no lamps! Sometimes tiles or stone would be compromised by moving or even changing a fixture. Plus, many bathrooms have little or no natural light so we use the lights more than in other rooms. Plus, it’s a room where seeing oneself in the mirror can be kind of a big deal.

But bathroom lighting can be a pain. Far too often, lighting a bathroom is harsh or inadequate. IP ratings (or the US equivalent, NEMA) tend to scare people off and unnecessarily narrow options. Lighting is so often an afterthought and a missed opportunity to imbue a room that can so easily tend towards the soulless and clinical with a bit of personality and charm.

Some of the lights in our primary bathroom; of the 7 lights in the room, 6 are vintage.

But do not fear! Lighting a bathroom may be something that begs your thoughtful consideration, but it’s not impossible or overly complicated. Here’s how I design bathroom lighting (with IP ratings, functionality and beauty in mind), plus the fixtures I love and why.

Design for the Space

This may seem obvious and is a great rule of thumb when designing the lighting in any room but it’s especially relevant in a bathroom (and kitchen) where very specific things need to happen. This means you need task and ambient light that makes sense for the room and what’s going in it.

This entire article is, it should be noted, mostly relevant for actual bathrooms, not little loos or powder rooms, where you can often turn to lighting that’s mostly decorative.

Bathrooms are often smaller rooms with lots of restrictions—certain things need to live in certain parts of the space. The space you’re actually working with, rather than the one you wish you had, should drive your lighting decisions. This may mean that lights will go in places you’d never really considered before—above doorways and inside shower nooks, for example.

Let’s Talk About Water Ingress

I don’t usually use IP rated lights in the bathrooms I design. Don’t get me wrong. IP Ratings (or NEMA ratings in the US) are important. For sure. I think about IP ratings when choosing where the lights will go and what they’ll be. But I think about this graphic even more:

This pretty graphic is from this helpful page on the Tala website. Zones 1 and 2 require a minimum of IPX4 (usually IP64 or IP44 — the first number deals with the ingress of solids like dust, not liquids). Most light fixtures live outside of these zones and therefore do not require IP ratings.

As the above illustration shows, you do not need to use IP-rated light fixtures in every part of your bathroom. In fact, you only need to use them in very specific areas. Areas that, I would argue, you’re not often putting lights.

For context, I just measured the distance between the sink taps and the wall lights in my bathroom and it’s 95 cm; in our girls’ bathroom it’s 120 cm— well outside the 60 cm radius of Zone 2. This means that when it comes to choosing your all-important sink lights, you are not restricted to IP-rated fixtures. The world is your oyster!

Start with the Sink

Some will have a bidet, some a bathtub, some a separate shower room, some a separate toilet space, but one thing every single bathroom will have? Is a sink. (Or two!)