Stair and landing lighting

Everywhere else on this site, getting the lighting wrong produces a room that feels worse than it should. On a staircase it produces a fall.

The mechanism is specific and worth understanding, because it explains why the usual advice does not apply. Your eye judges the position of a step from the shadow line at its front edge - the change in brightness between the tread and the riser below it. Anything that disrupts that line makes the stair harder to read.

Which means the failure modes here are not darkness. They are:

• Uneven light, which creates shadow lines where there are no edges and erases them where there are.
• Glare, which is worse on stairs than anywhere because you are looking slightly downward into whatever is in front of you.
• A bright top and a dark bottom, which leaves your eye adapted to the wrong level for the half of the flight you have not walked yet.

None of those is solved by a brighter bulb, and two of them are made worse by one. The underlying principles are in glare and visual comfort.

The strongest retrofit is strip lighting under the nosing of each tread, or run continuously along the inside edge of the flight. A COB strip at CRI 90+ hidden under the overhang defines every edge with no visible source at all, which is exactly the combination the eye wants. The mounting approach is the same as under-cabinet lighting that installs without tools, and the same adhesive caveats apply.

For the overhead layer the bulb matters less than the fixture count - but where the stairwell fitting is a sealed dome, which is common, it needs the enclosure rating. The Feit enclosed-rated A19 at 2700K covers that; a CRI 95 bulb is the better light in an open fitting. The distinction is in best LED bulbs for enclosed fixtures.

Match the color temperature to the rooms at either end. A staircase is a transition space, and a cool stairwell between two warm floors announces itself as an institutional corridor - with a brief adaptation as your eye crosses the boundary, on the one surface where that matters.

A staircase lit from one switch is a staircase you walk down in the dark half the time. It is the most common complaint about stair lighting and the most fixable.

The traditional answer is a pair of three-way switches, one at each end, wired so either controls the light. That is real electrical work on the building - permission if you rent, and generally an electrician either way. The details are in three-way and multi-location switching.

The route that needs nothing is a wireless remote mounted at the far end, paired to a smart bulb or a plug-in dimmer on the stairwell light. It sticks to the wall exactly where a switch should have been, drives up to ten devices, and Lutron publishes a ten-year typical battery life. The format is in wireless wall remotes.

The third option removes the decision entirely. A motion sensor on a stairwell is one of the two applications where sensors genuinely earn their place - hands are often full and the light is wanted for fifteen seconds. The case is in motion sensors and timers.

Whichever you choose, leave a very dim level running overnight if the stairs are used at night. A low continuous glow along the treads is far safer than a bright light somebody has to find a switch for.