Bedroom Lighting Ideas for Small Rooms and Box Rooms

Box rooms all have the same lighting. One bulb, dead centre, shining straight down. It makes the ceiling the brightest thing in the room, throws everything into shadow at the edges, and somehow manages to be both too bright to relax under and not bright enough to find anything.

You cannot move the ceiling light. You can make it irrelevant, which is better anyway.

The short answer

Light the edges of a small room, not the middle. Two light sources at different heights beat one overhead every time, and in a box room two is the right number rather than three. Keep everything warm toned, put at least one switch within reach of the bed, and use walls and shelves because you have no floor space to give away.

Why the ceiling light is the actual problem

A single overhead light does something specific to a small room: it lights the middle of the floor, which is the one part of a box room you are not using, and leaves the corners dark. Dark corners are what make a room read as small, because your eye stops at the shadow instead of carrying on to the wall.

Light the corners and the walls instead and the room reads as bigger than it is, with the same square footage and the same furniture. That is the whole trick, and everything below is a way of doing it.

Rule 1: go up the wall, because you have no floor

In a room where the bed takes 70% of the space, floor standing anything is a luxury. Everything that earns its place either goes on a wall, sits on a surface you already have, or hides behind something.

A strip along the top of a wardrobe or behind a headboard washes light up and across, which fills a corner without occupying one. A small sign on the wall gives the eye something to land on above furniture height. If you do have one free corner, that is the single best place for a lamp in the whole room, because light from a corner bounces off two walls before it reaches you.

The colour changing floor lamp comes in a 40cm version as well as the 150cm one, and the small one sits on a desk or a shelf rather than needing floor space at all.

Rule 2: two layers, not three

This is the honest one, and it is the opposite of most advice you will read.

In a normal sized room you want three layers of light: background, task and a focal point. We wrote about that in the guide comparing strips, fairy lights and neon signs. In a box room, three layers is clutter. Every light source is competing for the same small volume of air, and the result looks busy rather than considered.

Pick two. A strip or fairy lights for the background, and one of either a lamp or a sign for the thing your eye lands on. Leaving one wall completely empty is what makes the lit wall look deliberate rather than accidental.

Rule 3: keep it warm

Cool white light is for kitchens and offices. In a small bedroom it reads as clinical, it makes magnolia walls look grey, and it is the wrong thing to be sitting under at eleven at night.

Warm white, or warm toned colour, does the opposite. It is also more forgiving of a room you cannot redecorate, because warm light flattens out the colour of the walls rather than showing you exactly what shade of beige you have been given.

A lot of our lamps switch between three colour temperatures, so you can run cool while you are working and warm in the evening off the same lamp. That is two of your layers from one object, which is exactly what a small room wants.

Rule 4: one switch you can reach from the bed

Small point, large effect. If turning the light off means getting up and crossing the room, you will leave it on, and the room will be lit the way you did not want it lit for the last hour of every day.

Look for a switch on the unit, a remote, or app control. Several of our signs have a switch built into the sign itself rather than making you unplug the cable, and the RGB strips come with a remote in the box.

The dark bits: wardrobes, under the bed, the back of the door

Every small room has somewhere you cannot see into, and it is always the place you are looking for something at seven in the morning.

The LED motion sensor light sticks up magnetically or with adhesive and comes on when you open the door. The motion sensor COB strip runs on batteries and cuts to length, so it fits a shelf or a stair edge exactly, and nothing needs a socket anywhere near it.

Neither of these is decoration. They are the ones you stop noticing after a week and would miss immediately.

Small signs, for walls that cannot take a big one

A 40cm neon sign owns a normal bedroom wall. In a box room it owns the entire room, which may not be what you wanted.

There are smaller ones. The pink heart sign is 18 by 16cm, which is shelf sized rather than wall sized. The sun and moon sign is 13.5 by 30cm, tall and narrow, which suits the gap beside a door or between a wardrobe and a corner where nothing else fits.

The mirror trick

Putting a light near a mirror doubles what it does, because the mirror throws the glow back into the room and adds apparent depth to the wall it is on. It is the oldest small room trick there is and it still works.

The wavy mirror neon sign does both jobs in one object, which in a room with no spare wall is worth more than it sounds.

Common questions

Will lights make a small room feel smaller?

Only if they are pointing at the middle. Light aimed at walls and into corners makes a room feel larger, because your eye follows it out to the edges. Light aimed down from the centre does the opposite. The direction matters far more than the number of lights.

I am renting and cannot drill. What can I actually use?

Nearly all of it. Strips have adhesive backing, fairy lights drape or hang from what is already there, signs come with hooks or stand on a shelf, and lamps just plug in. The one to think about is adhesive on a painted wall, and we covered the test to do first in the guide on fitting strips in a rented flat.

Can I light a box room with one thing?

You can, and a corner lamp is the one to pick if so, because it throws light up and out rather than down. Two is better, but one placed at the edge of the room beats one in the middle every time.

What about a room with no spare sockets?

Battery fairy lights and the battery motion sensor strips need no socket at all. Most of the rest runs on USB, so a single plug with two or three USB ports will power several things from one socket, which is usually the actual constraint in a small room rather than the lighting itself.

Is it worth doing if I am moving out in a year?

All of this comes with you. Strips peel off, signs come off their hooks, lamps unplug. Nothing here is fitted to the building, which is rather the point of buying it rather than asking a landlord for anything.

The short version

Ignore the ceiling light. Put light at the edges, go up the walls because you have no floor, and stop at two sources rather than three. Keep it warm, keep a switch by the bed, and put something in the wardrobe that comes on by itself.

Start with LED Strip & Fairy Lights for the background layer, then pick one thing from Lamps or LED Neon Signs for the bit you actually look at. The whole range is in LED Lights & Lamps if you would rather browse it all at once.