STACK #257 March 2026

SMART HOME

TECH FEATURE

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GET SMARTER WITH SMART LIGHTING

Smart lighting is a fantastic way to personalise your home without needing to spend big or drill holes in the walls. Quality smart lights can also help to improve your lifestyle – quietly influencing your mood and working with your body’s natural rhythms. Words James O’Connor Set the mood

while brighter environments can lift energy and focus. By layering ambient, task and accent lighting, you can shape a room’s atmosphere with precision. Watching a horror movie in dramatic red? Hosting a candlelit dinner without the candles? Or soaking in the tub in a softly lit bathroom after a long day? Smart lighting makes experimentation effortless – and surprisingly transformative. Wake up, chill out Your circadian rhythm is the internal clock that regulates sleep, energy, and hormone production. One of its strongest cues is light. Exposure to bright, cool light in the morning helps suppress

Smart lighting allows you to shift the colour and tone of a room to suit how you want to feel. Controlled via an app or smart home hub, bulbs and fixtures can be dimmed, brightened, or tuned from warm amber to cool daylight in seconds. Light temperature plays a powerful role in how a space feels. Warm light can create a sense of comfort and relaxation, making it ideal for dining rooms and bedrooms, while cooler tones promote alertness and clarity, which is why they’re often used in kitchens and workspaces. Brightness matters just as much as colour. Lower light levels signal the body to wind down,

LIFX Luna Table and Wall Colour Lamp

The LIFX Luna runs the full colour spectrum with brightness up to 1000 lumens, adjustable down to a soft glow at night. It’s an affordable entry point into smart lighting that can dramatically shift the feel of a room. Built-in buttons allow control without reaching for your phone, and preset effects include sunrise simulations, morphing colour transitions, and even a soft cloudy-sky mode. Portable and versatile, it can sit on a table or mount to a wall, delivering expressive mood lighting wherever it’s placed.

melatonin (the hormone that makes you sleepy) and boosts alertness. So setting your lights to gradually brighten or shift to a cooler tone in the morning can make waking up feel more natural – especially in darker months or in rooms without much sunlight. In the evening, the opposite approach works best. Dimming lights and shifting to warmer tones reduces blue-light stimulation, helping your body prepare for rest. Research shows that

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MARCH 2026