One central light can leave a bathroom feeling flat, no matter how powerful the light is. Add two or three smaller sources at different heights, and the room changes shape.
Not every new light needs a rewire and an electrician booked in. Sometimes it's the simplest and quickest of changes that can make the biggest impact.
Here’s all the bathroom lighting ideas we keep coming back to.
Layer your bathroom lighting
One ceiling light will show you the room. But it will struggle to do much more.
Layering is what happens when you stop asking it to do everything. Bring in a wall light at head height, then a spotlight angled at a shelf or maybe a lantern-style fitting that catches the eye on the way past.
Each one does one job and does it well. The room gains depth from warm pools of light instead of one flat wash, and you get to choose which ones to switch on.
The difference shows up at the mirror first. Light from directly overhead drops shadows under the eyes, often giving bathroom mirrors a reputation they don't deserve. Bring the light around to the sides, and the shadows go with it.
Bathroom wall lights at eye level
A wall light is the only fitting in a bathroom you'll ever look at directly. It sits at eye level, which means it has to earn that attention.
That's probably why traditional styles haven't gone anywhere. A Burlington wall light in chrome, with a frosted cup shade and a proper arm, isn't trying to disappear into the wall and not be seen.
It's the kind of fitting you'd notice even when switched off, the sort of detail that gives a room a bit of personality rather than just light.
Fluted glass takes the idea somewhere else. Ribbed glass in a brass fitting breaks the light up as it passes through, so you get a softer, patterned glow rather than a single bright source. And it works just as well in a modern bathroom as a period one.
This Butler & Rose Fluted Glass Shade has a swan neck for a retro feel in a range of colours to suit your room.
Then there's the exposed bulb. A glass globe on a brushed nickel vertical stem, with the filament visible through clear glass. It doesn't hide the light source at all. It makes it the whole point.
The bulb is part of the fitting here rather than something hidden inside it, so a warm filament changes the mood of the room in a way a cool white one won't.
Frame the mirror, don’t just light it
Most bathroom light comes from somewhere else in the room and just happens to land on the mirror. An illuminated mirror flips that.
It comes with its own light built in. Turn everything off and leave just a backlit mirror on. The light spills out around the edges onto the wall behind it and the whole room drops into something much softer.
Instead of a standard bulb drawing your eye to one intense point, a lit mirror diffuses the light seamlessly so it falls evenly. First thing in the morning, that gentle, even glow is far kinder to your face than a sharp overhead glare.
Light the alcove, not just the room
It's not just the mirror that looks better with the right light behind it.
A recessed shelf in the shower is a good idea on its own. Put a light inside it and it stops being just storage.
Set into the top of the alcove and angled down, the light fitting picks out the edge of the shower shelf and everything on it.
From outside the shower, you see a lit rectangle in a tiled wall, glowing slightly. It does more for a shower enclosure than the ceiling light ever will.
The same works on an alcove beside the bath, or the gap above a vanity unit where a shelf was always going to go. If there's a recess in the wall, there's somewhere for a light to sit.
There are plenty of other options that give you a similar effect if you don't want to run wiring through the wall. A slim LED strip fixed to the underside of a shelf, or run along the top of a vanity unit, gets you a comparable pool of light without touching a tile.
Getting the IP Rating right
Every bathroom light carries an IP rating, two numbers following the letters IP. The second number is the one that matters here. That’s the water rating, and the closer a light sits to water, the higher that number needs to be.
A light inside a shower recess sits in Zone 1, the space directly above the bath or shower, up to 2.25 metres from the floor. Anything in that zone needs to be rated IP65, sealed against direct jets of water, not just splashes.
Step outside the enclosure and the rules relax slightly: within 60cm of any bath, shower or basin tap, IP44 is the minimum, which is what most bathroom wall lights already come with.
Wiring inside a shower recess means running a cable behind the tiles, so it needs doing before the tiling goes on. Retrofitting one afterwards usually means taking tiles off to reach it, and that can get very expensive.
Swapping a light for another in the same spot is fine to get on with yourself. Anything new going in or directly above a bath or shower needs signing off by a registered electrician, and this isn't a zone to guess your way through.
Bathroom ceiling lights worth looking up at
A ceiling light is the one fitting everybody has. It's also the one with the most range, from something that sits quietly overhead to a pendant that becomes the first thing you notice in the room.
A flush fitting in fluted glass and matte black sits close enough to the ceiling that there's no gap between the fixing and the surface it's mounted on.
Natural stone does something similar with texture instead of glass. It's a pale, naturally pitted stone, often used in Mediterranean interiors, and the light catches every pit and ridge rather than sitting flat across a smooth shade.
Neither takes up any real height, so a low ceiling doesn't rule them out.
A pendant is the bigger move. In a room with height to spare, a fitting that hangs gives the eye somewhere to land, and a shade on a long cord does more for a tall bathroom than anything sitting flat against the ceiling.
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Crosswater Tranquil Pendant LightA dimmable pendant light with adjustable height, adding moody, luxurious ambience to your bathroom. Available in six metallic finishes for a striking centerpiece. |
Not every ceiling can take something hanging from it, and not every bathroom wants one. A dimmable downlight will still give you a room that's bright at seven in the morning yet available to be nice and low at ten at night.
Small bathroom lighting ideas
A small bathroom is the one where lighting counts the most. Especially if there's no window to bring in natural light. That means the room can look the same every hour of the day.
There’s no shortage of ideas for a small bathroom, only a little less space to fit them into.
Downlights sit flush to the ceiling, which means you keep every inch of height in a room that hasn't got much to spare. Spread a few across the ceiling rather than clustering them in the middle, and the light reaches the corners instead of pooling in one spot.
A light beside the mirror and something lower down near the floor stop the corners announcing themselves and help the room feel larger.
You can take advantage of how light can bounce around a room too. Light bouncing off a pale wall goes further than light hitting a dark one, which is why a small bathroom in a soft colour can lift the room in a way a dark colour might not manage.
From a fluted wall light that quietly changes the feel of the room to a pendant that gives it a different character after dark. Take a look at our full range of bathroom lighting and see what's possible in your own space.
