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| | Light Reading
Beauty is a Light Switch Away
A GE site illuminates residential lighting design principles.
BY CHRIS LEPORINI
Poor lighting can make a home seem drab and unappealing, dimming buyers’ perceptions about the property’s value. They might not realize proper lighting’s potential to transform a room. This is an understandable oversight; if a room’s lighting works, it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Yet, in addition to serving strictly functional purposes—such as helping you to avoid bumping into your coffee table—lighting can establish a room’s mood as sophisticated, romantic, or homey. You can use GE’s Lighting Solution Center to educate buyers about how they can use this essential design element to make a prospective home more attractive. This graphics-intensive site illustrates lighting design principles in action, allowing users to see how different lighting styles affect a room's appearance.
The site’s “Virtual House” provides an interactive, 360-degree IPIX virtual home tour that shows users the impact that lighting has on a home's interiors. A GE designer arranged the lighting for the suburban Brecksville, Ohio, home. The tour takes users through eight rooms: living room, bathroom, foyer, office, kitchen, dining room, and family room, showcasing a variety of residential light fixtures, lighting techniques, and light sources. The Virtual House also includes notes for each room explaining the lighting strategies the designer employed. Finally, the tour features "hot spots," links within the image (identified by a red border) that users can click on to find out more information about featured techniques and products. The section provides a text-based index of these links as well.
The Virtual Lighting Designer takes this interactive approach to another level, letting users create their own lighting schemes for the virtual home. First, users choose which room they want to work with, then they select the lights they want to use from a menu. The site flips virtual “on” and “off” switches according to users’ selections, turning individual fixtures on and off. Once again, users can examine the room’s interior through a panoramic 360-degree view. If users like a particular look, they can click to receive recommendations on which bulbs they should buy to achieve the desired effect in their own home.
For users who feel totally in the dark about lighting design, the site supplies interactive guides to lighting solutions, arranged by room, fixture, and product type. The “rooms” category gives tips on how to enhance your home’s décor with different lighting styles. It explains what lighting effects are preferable for each room and what kinds of fixtures are needed to achieve them. Users looking for more information on everything from track lighting to table lamps can turn to the fixture section. The products category contains overviews of different types of bulbs, including incandescent, halogen, compact florescent, florescent, and Energy Star (products that meet federal energy-efficiency guidelines).
The graphics-intensive site has the advantage of showing as well as telling, allowing users to view lighting design principles online. Unfortunately, the same qualities that make the site so useful and fun to explore, could make it a frustrating experience for some users. Particularly in the case of its interactive tours, the site’s abundant graphics might bog down loading times for users with slower Internet connections. For users with speedier connections (or a lot of patience), the site provides a rich resource for understanding lightings’ contribution to a room’s décor. GE’s Lighting Solution Center presents a visual aid for demonstrating to buyers how adding a chandelier could accent their living room or how an under-cabinet light could save them space in a small kitchen. Sometimes the right lighting is all it takes to transform a dreary house into a cheerful home.
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Suggest a Site For Review
Every week, REALTOR® Magazine Online's Web review editor surfs the Internet to find sites useful to your business and off-hours lives. Have a favorite real estate Web site that you would like to see reviewed? Send your suggestions to Chris Leporini at mediatech@realtors.org. All decisions on which sites will be reviewed are completely at the discretion of REALTOR® Magazine Online's editorial staff. Please note: this column does not review individual practitioner or brokerage sites.
The column's focus includes free sites, as well as sites that charge for goods and services, but which still offer a free component of practical, sustained value to real estate practitioners, such as a free newsletter or regular news information.
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REALTOR® Magazine Online's "Web Review" summarizes the content of Web sites that may be of interest to members. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online are not responsible for, and nothing in the Web site profile shall constitute NAR's or REALTOR® Magazine Online's endorsement of, the web site, its content, products and services, or its provider. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online believe the information contained in this profile was correct and accurate as of the time it was prepared, but do not warrant or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of that information and are not responsible for changes in the Web site. Members should conduct their own independent review of the Web site prior to any use of Web site, its content, products, or services to determine their suitability for the member's intended purpose. | |
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