Should I Add Lighting to Closets?
Q. My home has deep, dark closets. Should I add lighting to make them more of a selling feature?
A. Good closet lighting “is as important as a fresh coat of paint,” when you plan to sell your home, said Wendy Sarasohn, an associate real estate broker at the Corcoran Group in Manhattan. “It enhances the value of the home because it shows attention to detail.”
Potential buyers always open closets when touring properties, she added, and “they’re quite impressed by ones that are organized and bright.”
But not all lighting solutions are equal. For an upscale look, Ms. Sarasohn said, “when you open a closet door, the light should go on automatically,” she said. “There should not be a string hanging down that you need to pull.”
Brian Orter, a lighting designer and the owner of BOLD in New York, agreed. Closet lights should turn on and off automatically, he said, with either a doorjamb switch or an occupancy sensor.
“A jamb switch is the same thing that’s in your refrigerator: You open the door and the light turns on,” he explained. Whereas “an occupancy sensor is really a motion sensor. It will sense you and the door, and then time out after a while. The nice thing about that is that if you don’t close the door, it will shut off automatically.”
Using either one of these kinds of switches, he said, is convenient, helps save energy and eliminates the need for an additional switch on the wall.
For the fixture itself, he recommended “a linear, low-profile, diffused LED fixture,” mounted inside the closet, above the door. It should provide bright, warm-colored light with a color temperature of 2700 to 3000 kelvin.
Installing this equipment is likely to require some serious electrical work, Mr. Orter said, including running new wires in the walls, but he stressed that it is the only way to do it properly. And he cautioned against makeshift approaches like plugging a closet light into an electrical outlet, as this will not only look bad, but also create a potential fire hazard.
If you want to keep costs down, Mr. Orter offered a rule of thumb for deciding where to cut back. “If you can step into the closet, even with just one step, you should light it from the inside,” he said, with a dedicated fixture. “If you’re unable to step into it, you can light it from the corridor or room outside, so that light just bleeds into it.”
Finally, once your closets are illuminated, don’t forget the value of organizing what’s inside, Ms. Sarasohn said: “If you have expensive clothing and shoes in your closets, good lighting will help show them off,” which can help fuel buyers’ passion for your property. “Very often, a potential buyer will see that a seller has a collection of Hermès products or Manolo Blahnik shoes,” she said. “They think, ‘If I buy this apartment, then I, too, can have those things.’ ”
Copyright © 2014 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.