Colour temperature is the single setting that decides whether a room feels warm and calm or clinical and flat. It is measured in kelvin, and the numbers run the opposite way to intuition: lower kelvin is warmer and more golden, higher kelvin is cooler and bluer.
What colour temperature should I use at home?
For most living spaces, 2700K. That is the warm, slightly golden light people associate with a comfortable home, close to the tone of an old incandescent bulb. It flatters skin, warms wood and linen, and reads as evening light even during the day.
What the numbers mean
1800 to 2200K is candlelight — very warm, quite dim, atmospheric rather than useful. 2700K is standard warm white, the default for living rooms, bedrooms and dining rooms. 3000K is a slightly crisper warm white that suits kitchens and bathrooms where you want a little more clarity. 4000K is neutral white, which belongs in a workshop or a garage. Anything at 5000K or above is daylight white, and in a home it feels like an office at night.
Room by room
Living room: 2700K throughout. This is where you spend evenings, and warmth matters more than precision.
Dining room: 2700K, ideally on a dimmer. Food looks better under warm light, and being able to drop the level at the end of a meal changes the room completely.
Bedroom: 2700K, or 2200K for bedside lights if you read before sleep. Cooler light suppresses melatonin, which is exactly what you do not want at eleven at night.
Kitchen: 2700K for pendants over an island, 3000K for task lighting under cabinets where you are handling knives.
Bathroom: 2700 to 3000K around a mirror. Higher than that and everyone looks unwell.
Hallway: 2700K. Consistency with the rooms either side matters more than anything else here.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Mixing temperatures in one room. Two bulbs at 2700K and one at 4000K will look broken even if you cannot name why. When you replace a bulb, replace it with the same temperature, and when you buy for a new room, buy all the bulbs at once.
What about CRI?
Colour rendering index describes how accurately a light source shows colour, on a scale to 100. Below 80 and colours go muddy — terracotta reads brown, greens go grey. Look for 90 or above in any room where you care how things look, which is most of them. It is the specification people ignore and then cannot work out what is wrong.
Dimming changes the temperature too
Traditional bulbs get warmer as they dim, which is part of why candlelight feels the way it does. Most LEDs hold a fixed temperature at every level. If you want that warming effect, look for bulbs described as warm dim or dim to warm.
Our fixtures are sold without bulbs precisely so you can make these choices deliberately. Start with ceiling lights or wall lights and pick the bulb to match the room.