Lighting Your Coves and Crown Molding with LEDs

Remarkable décor takes more than a few strategically placed pieces. It takes careful planning, the right arrangement and perfect lighting. Installing LED lights in your coves or crown molding can add an element of upscale style, a splash of fun or a fresh touch of charm; it’s all in your design.

Cove lighting is the upward lighting of a ceiling from below. (The contrasts with soffit lighting, which is the downward lighting of a wall or vertical surface from the ceiling.)

Superior Indirect Lighting: What LEDs Can Do for Your Space

The days of recessed incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lights are over. Design trends are leaning toward more sustainable, practical and cost-effective lighting, and LEDs are the perfect solution.

Because LEDs are easy to work with and are completely customizable, design firms and do-it-yourself types are snapping them up for residential projects. They’re ideal for creating a dramatic effect that allows light to wash down a wall (soffit lighting) or to illuminate an entire room by uplighting the ceiling, creating a fantastic variation from ordinary décor. This uplighting effect, usually accomplished by placing linear LED lights in crown molding or another horizontal plane below the ceiling, is called cove lighting.

These Aren’t Your Grandfather’s Lights

While the comforting glow of a 40-watt incandescent bulb is nice in some settings, it can’t do what LEDs can. LED bulbs are available as stand-alone lights, in bars of various lengths and in flexible rope configurations. Flexible rope LEDs are ideal for brightening room borders, particularly behind curved surfaces such as wall cutouts and coves.

“LED lights are versatile enough that they can be used nearly anywhere. Many of our clients want rope lights or bars installed in crown molding in family rooms, media rooms and kids’ rooms,” says Cheryl Zoellner of Arkansas Little Rock’s Metropolitan Decorating. “We’ve worked in gorgeous homes where displaying the highlights properly can only be done with LEDs.”

Brightness and intensity are factors in choosing the right lighting system, and in LED lights, those are calculated differently than they are with traditional incandescent bulbs.

“If you want a bright light, look for high lumens – you won’t even see watts,” says Zoellner. “LEDs consume less power than incandescent bulbs, so you’ll see brightness measured in lumens and descriptors when it comes to color. Dimmable LEDs give homeowners an even wider range of options.”

A 2,600-lumen LED light is as bright as a 150-watt incandescent light, but it’s powered with a sixth of the energy. When it comes to color, LEDs can provide warm, soft or bright light; light temperature is measured in kelvins, and lower numbers mean warmer light.

LED Lights in Coves, Media Rooms and Libraries

Art collectors have long known the benefits of installing LED lighting in coves and above beautiful pieces, and now decorators are using them to transform ordinary places into extraordinary retreats. When you want to avoid obtrusive light fixtures without sacrificing light quality, tucking LEDs into crown molding is the way to go. Crown molding with lighting effects transforms an ordinary room into a designer’s dream space that’s worthy of a magazine feature. The long lifespan of an LED light source makes for the best rope lights for crown molding, because once they’re installed, you’ll rarely if ever need to replace them. Linear LED rope lights and light bars, because of their low profile when installed properly, are exactly what you need for the ideal crown molding light fixture.

“Whether you’re highlighting a faux-finished wall or you want to create ambience in an entire room, I feel like LEDs are your best bet,” says Zoellner, whose creative partner specializes in decorative painting and art restoration.

Elegant crown molding with lights are frequently seen in upscale hotels, restaurants, and clubs, but because they can be installed relatively easily, they can be used by any homeowner wishing to raise their décor to a new level for an affordable cost.

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