Most renovation projects start with a constraint. The windows are where they are. The building envelope isn't changing. You're working within someone else's architecture, often from an era when natural light wasn't the priority it is now. A Dubai apartment tower from 2008, a villa plot where the neighbor built right up to your boundary, a commercial space that faces an interior corridor. You can't add a second window, so what do you do?
Christopher Alexander wrote about light from two sides as the ideal, and he was right, but ideals assume you're building from scratch. Renovation is the art of working with what exists. The question becomes: can you create some of that same quality, that sense of balanced light and breathing space, without tearing down walls? I think you can, but it requires being deliberate about how artificial light enters a room.
The mistake most people make is thinking of artificial light as a single thing. They want "enough light," so they install a central fixture or a grid of downlights and call it done. But that recreates the same problem as a single window: light from one direction, harsh shadows, your eyes constantly adjusting. What works better is thinking in layers. A floor lamp in one corner, a wall sconce on the opposite side, maybe a table lamp or under-cabinet lighting. Not brighter, necessarily, but from multiple sources. The room starts to feel less flat.
Alexander also noticed something interesting about shallow rooms. When you can't get light from two sides, a room that's only eight feet deep with windows side by side can still work. The light bounces off the back wall and ricochets between the windows, creating that softer, glare-free quality. But most rooms aren't eight feet deep. When you're stuck with a deeper single-windowed space, the old solution was architectural: very high ceilings, white walls, tall windows set in deep reveals. Georgian dining rooms worked this way. The volume itself became part of the solution. You can't fake ceiling height, not really. Paint the ceiling lighter and you might trick the eye for a moment, but the room still feels compressed because it is compressed. The air doesn't move the same way. Sound behaves differently. If the ceiling is low, you have to work with that limitation honestly.
What you can do is use color to manage how light behaves in the space you have. Pale walls, especially in warm off-whites or soft grays, will bounce whatever light exists around more effectively. They won't make the ceiling higher, but they'll keep the room from feeling like a cave. Darker colors on lower walls with lighter tones above can help direct the eye upward, though this is more about managing perception than solving the underlying problem. The real work is still in the lighting itself: multiple sources at different heights, placed so they illuminate walls and not just the floor, creating that sense of light moving through the room rather than just landing in it.
Here's what I've noticed: when you light a space well, people stop talking about the light. They just say the room feels good, or they want to spend time there, or it photographs well. They don't know why. But when you get it wrong, they definitely notice. They'll complain about glare, or say they can't see properly, or they'll just avoid using the room. Good artificial lighting should be as unobtrusive as good natural light. It should let you forget about it entirely. That only happens when it's coming from more than one place, when it's balanced, when someone actually thought about how the room would be inhabited instead of just making sure there was "enough" light. The architecture might be fixed, but the atmosphere isn't. That's where the work happens.