Have you ever wondered how it is that some people's homes look like they belong on the pages of a glossy mag or in one of those lifestyle TV shows? The surprisingly simple reason in many cases is that they use lighting effectively. And that's it.

Well thought out lighting can turn even the most drab space into a chic looking interior (think how cheap stage sets work) and poor lighting can utterly ruin even the most stylish decor. Yet it is quite astonishing just how many people will either rely totally on ambient (and mostly overhead) lighting or go to the other extreme and attempt to illuminate a room entirely with decorative lighting (an effect not dissimilar to using candles - pretty if somewhat dim).

It is a simple fact that any room lit predominantly using ambient light will seem featureless, flat, slightly grubby and totally unappealing. Equally, if all the available illumination is from accent lighting and decorative feature lamps the effect will be highly dramatic but also highly uncomfortable thanks to all the stark contrast between light and shadow.

The (not very deep or mysterious) secret to creating effective home lighting is to combine all the four basic lighting styles (ambient, accent, task and decorative) rather than opting just for one or two. Needless to say, you should tweak the ratio between these four styles to achieve your desired functional and aesthetic goals, but there's no getting away from the fact that effective home lighting relies on ensuring that all the available lighting types are present and able to work together.

Ambient light appears to fill a space with diffuse light and in domestic settings is most commonly supplied by central ceiling lights and in work places by fluorescent strip lights. Ambient light is used to build a framework of background light within which to mount the other types. Without sufficient ambient light other types of lighting tend to seem both not bright enough to properly illuminate the space yet also too bright since they contrast too strongly within the unlit background.

Task lighting is exactly what it sounds like, light for performing tasks - cooking, craftwork, reading, etc - and is generally concentrated on a small area and quite bright, though task light that is too bright can cause eye-strain as easily as light that is too dim.

Accent lighting is used to enhance (or accentuate) specific features - objects of art, interesting textures, colors or shapes, striking architectural lines, anything you like. The light source itself should be low key so as not to distract from whatever it is that's being lit.

Decorative lighting is not unlike accent lighting except that it is the light source itself that is the focus of attention (Tiffany lamps for example).

Blending these various types of lighting is most easily achieved by simply assigning groups of each type to independent control switches. This is often already the case with task lighting since people usually want to be able to eliminate it from the lighting scheme if the associated task is not actually being performed.

The most important of the lighting types to get right though is arguably the very one that attracts least attention, namely ambient lighting. Altering the levels of ambient light can fundamentally change how the overall effect looks and installing dimmer switches to control your ambient lighting is probably the single most effective thing you can do to help create effective home lighting.

This is perhaps best demonstrated with kitchen lighting, which by its nature requires a great deal of task lighting. If ambient light is missing then your kitchen will be full of dark spots contrasting wildly with pools of dazzlingly bright light. Conversely if you install a couple of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling you will totally wash away the value of the task lighting and create dead zones (where you find yourself working in your own shadow) into the bargain. A much better option would be to fit a bank of down lights controlled by a dimmer to obtain sufficient ambient light to enhance rather than drown out the task lighting.