Interior photographers spend most of a shoot managing light rather than arranging furniture, and the habits they use to make a room photograph well are largely the same ones that make it pleasant to sit in.
Stop lighting the room
The central ceiling fitting lights the floor, flattens every surface and puts shadows under everything at eye level. It is the single most damaging object in most interiors.
The alternative is to light the things you look at and leave the rest dark. A room does not need to be evenly lit. It needs enough light in the places where something happens.
Three heights, not one
Aim for light at roughly three levels. Something low, a lamp on a side table at around sixty centimetres. Something at standing height, a floor lamp or wall light. And something incidental and lower still, a candle or a small lamp on a shelf.
Two lamps at different heights will transform a room more than any amount of redecorating, because the shadows between them give the space depth.
Match the colour temperature
The most common fault in otherwise careful rooms is mixed bulb temperature. One warm lamp beside one cool one makes both look wrong, and the room reads as slightly grubby without anyone being able to say why.
Pick one temperature, somewhere around 2700 kelvin for living rooms, and use it everywhere. Check the boxes rather than trusting the word warm on the front.
Bounce it off something
Direct light is harsh and makes surfaces look cheap. Light that has hit a wall or ceiling first arrives softened and takes on the colour of whatever it touched.
This is why a lamp in a corner does more work than a lamp in the middle of a room, and why pale walls with a warm undertone flatter almost everything.
Put lamps where you would not
A small lamp on a bookshelf, on a kitchen counter, on the floor behind a chair. These are the positions photographers use to build depth, and they are almost never where a lamp is placed by instinct.
The test is simple. Turn off the main light and see whether the room still works. If it collapses into gloom, the lighting is doing one job in one place, and the room has no evening version of itself.
