How to design a lighting plan for a house (step by step)

Every great lighting plan answers three questions for every room: what needs light to work, what deserves light to look good, and where your hand lands when you walk in. Get those right and the house feels expensive; get them wrong and no quantity of downlights saves it.

Step 1 — start from the real floor plan

Don't sketch on graph paper. Use the builder's floor plan — it has the walls, the island bench, the bed positions. Upload it to a lighting plan designer and you're placing lights on the actual house, to scale, from minute one.

Step 2 — layer the light

Rooms that feel right have three layers, switched separately:

• Task light — downlights over benches, mirrors and desks. Where the work happens.
• Ambient light — the general fill. Fewer downlights than you think, dimmed more often than you think.
• Feature light — LED strip under the island or in the alfresco ceiling, wall washers on stone, pendants over the dining table. This is the layer customers fall in love with, and the one most plans forget.

Step 3 — get downlight spacing right

Rules of thumb that survive contact with real ceilings: keep downlights roughly 900–1200 mm off the walls, space them at about half the ceiling height apart for even fill, and centre them on the things that matter — the bench, the bed, the artwork — not on the room's geometric grid. In a 2.7 m ceiling that's a light roughly every 1.3–1.5 m in task areas, wider in circulation zones.

Step 4 — plan the switching before the sparkie asks

Walk the plan the way you'll walk the house at night. Every doorway you regularly use needs a switch; beds get two-way switching; the alfresco gets its switch inside the door, not out in the weather. Mark dimmers on the ambient and feature layers — task light rarely needs one. In robot® Plan each placed switch knows its gangs and which circuits it drives, so the switching design becomes part of the plan instead of an argument at rough-in.

Step 5 — turn the plan into the quote

A finished lighting plan is a shopping list wearing a disguise: every symbol is a product and an hour of labour. Software that turns the plan into an itemised quote closes the loop — the customer approves the design and the price in the same sitting.

Try the whole flow on your own floor plan — the designer is free for 30 days, and the videos walk a full house in about ten minutes.