After entering practical life, we must sacrifice our comfort and work in places that don’t match our homes. An office is such a place where generally people don’t get to decide how their room looks like, so sometimes we find it necessary to make some changes in the environment to make it adjust to our taste. It is not possible to build a comfortable environment as close to home as possible for the employees.
Nowadays, as businesses grow, employers hire more and more employees, building offices with less space. Finding a room with windows may sometimes get difficult if you are looking for an office, so fear not, there are ways to lighten up your office even without windows.
The Need for Lighting
Working in offices is a tedious job; you have to spend hours away from your comfortable home in a competitive environment where you have to constantly innovate and think. You have to be constantly full of energy and bear the pressure of deadlines. Keeping the enthusiasm level of your employees high enough is a hard job but unavoidable in the long term. A dull office with no proper lighting or windows won’t be much of a help.
Proper Lighting Enhances Health
The human body and mind need a certain exposure to natural light to function properly, but in cases like a windowless office, artificial light can be sufficient to trigger our hormones properly. The absence of proper lighting can make the employees feel gloomy or fatigued, just like naturally, we are all adept at feeling sleepy when the sun goes down.
Problems like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), claustrophobia, and migraines can be caused by a lack of lighting on a daily basis. These problems may lead to clinical depression, so there is no chance that one works in a dim light environment for long periods and comes out unscathed. The human mind is affected by the environment, and light directly affects our sleep patterns. Therefore, ignoring it is not smart.
Tone of Lighting
The natural light we see as we walk in a park during the day has a shift towards the blue tone. Mimicking natural light, as experts say, “adding more blue to the mix” is an important factor to keep in mind while lighting your workplace. High illuminance lighting during the daytime is also important as it is closer to sunlight.
Ways to Light a Windowless Office
Even offices with no windows can be designed to provide us health benefits, whether physical or mental. In a windowless office, it is easier to control the lighting as it is all artificial. Giving personalized lighting options to employees is always a good idea as it increases their happiness due to increased control about their environment.
1. Wall Lamps
Wall lamps come in all shapes and sizes; they are the most convenient option for lighting a windowless room. The diversity in these lamps is just huge; if you scroll online, you’ll find lamps of all colors, shapes, and sizes. You can choose between retro and modern styles depending on your office functioning and taste. You can even choose multi-color LED bulbs for your lamps to change the spectrum of light according to your mood.
2. Ceiling Lights
Ceiling lights are an old-fashioned way of lighting a space. In the old days, the rich used chandeliers to express their wealth, but now you can get a retro or modern-looking chandelier under 100$. Then you also have the option of hanging individual lamps, which can be used for targeted lighting, or you can get multiple of those with different colors to enhance the background of your office. The options are many, so be creative.
3. Cove Lighting
This is one of the common modern methods to light an office. These lights are used to light a place with no direct sunlight as it illuminates the whole room evenly. The plus point of cove lighting is that it avoids direct contact of your eyes with the light. Using energy-efficient tubes, you can lower the cost of electricity and give your office an aesthetic look.
4. Desk Lamps
Place your desk in the position that suits you, then add the table lamp for focused lighting. This helps you maintain your focus. Table or desk lamps come in all shapes and sizes. The unique point of table lamps is that they are adjustable and gives your desk an office-like look. The best lamps for office work are the adjustable LED lamps which are powerful and convenient.
5. Floor Lamps
Floor lamps blend into the normal office environment. You can either get a floor lamp with shades to make your office look better or an LED standing lamp to actively add to the luminance of your office. You can place them anywhere in the office to suit your decorative choice.
6. Ceiling Glass
We live in the 21st century and often seek uniqueness in our workplace; if your office is on the top floor, we have just the right thing for you! A ceiling glass may seem an expensive alternative to artificial light, but it’s always a worthy one. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole ceiling; just a few skylights spread across your office can bring a great change in the environment and save you from hefty electricity bills.
7. Wall Colors
A white wall emits more light than a dull one. That is why traditionally, halls have been painted white to ensure luminance in the building. Choosing the right wall color is important for your office; it is a necessary step to brighten your office and show your taste.
Picking a color can be a hard decision, but it’s not an impossible one. A colorful environment can increase your productivity and boost the morale of employees. A light color such as sky blue, white, or yellow provides freshness and keeps the room lit. The more bright color is, the more it’ll give an effect of natural light in a windowless room. Keep in mind that lighter colors get dirty easily, and they must be kept clean so they can show their full potential in your office
8. Adding Mirrors
Mirrors add to the home-like sense of offices. This maybe was the intention when offices started installing mirrors but now having an aesthetic mirror or mirror wall stickers is an element of a good office design. Mirrors reflect light, and having properly placed in an office, they act as one of the most effective lighting solutions for an office without windows.
Conclusion
A windowless office does not mean that it is any less than an office with windows; you can achieve just as much without windows as you can with windows. We live in an era where technology can provide us nature-like lighting in any closed chamber, whether it is a large hall divided into cabins or a small room in the corner.
In short, there’s nothing that can’t be achieved with planning and a little bit of hard work.