Staircase & Stairwell Lighting
A stairwell is a vertical room, and it wants a fixture with drop. These long pendants and clusters are made to fall through the void of a staircase or a double-height entry — sized to be seen from above and below.
A staircase is two lighting problems at once. You need to see the treads safely, and you have a tall volume that a single flush fixture will never fill. A long pendant or a cascading fixture hung down the stairwell answers the second; wall lights at intervals answer the first. Whatever goes up there, make sure you can reach it — a fixture that needs scaffolding to change a bulb is a fixture you will come to resent.
Full walkthrough: staircase and stairwell lighting ideas, plus how to size a chandelier by room. Also see chandeliers and wall lighting. One to start from in this range: The Light of the Factory – Industrial Pendant Light.
Staircase lighting: what is in the range
This page is the widest one in the store, 576 fixtures: 308 pendants, 183 wall lights, 75 ceiling lights, five chandeliers and a few outdoor wall lights. The pendants and chandeliers are for the void of the stairwell, the wall lights are for the treads, and the ceiling lights are for the landing or a low entry where nothing can hang. Just under half of the fixtures (44%) have a colour or finish option, and about one in eight lists a size and about as many a diameter. For a landing, the Ceiling Light with Scandinavian flowers is one of the more decorative ceiling lights here.
How high, how big, how bright
Over a stairwell, keep the fixture's lowest point at least 7 feet (2.1 m) above every tread and landing it passes over, and size it for how it reads from the landing as well as from the hall below. Where the ceiling is low, a flush or semi-flush fitting is the safer choice; flush versus semi-flush for low ceilings compares the two. For the treads themselves, mount wall lights 60 to 66 inches (150 to 170 cm) above the nosing line and space them so one pool of light hands over to the next. A warm bulb of about 2700K keeps the stairs soft at night, and the colour temperature guide puts numbers on it. Glass shades suit a stairwell because you see them from above and below; see the warm amber glass shades. The Nordic Luxury Modern Glass Pendant Light includes sizes up to 44 cm tall, in amber or smoke grey.
