Backlit furniture trend has sprung up a few years ago, and managed to find its audience within the mainstream. A popular style for the outdoors, lighted furnishings gradually entered the interior design radiating every corner of the house with their gentle glow. Today illuminated furniture pieces come in very different forms and colors. And they can be quite tasteful, too.
A lot of lighted furnishings are made with LED lights that don’t consume too much energy, but also keep the surfaces a normal temperature.
Wayfair offers an innovative dining table design that doesn’t necessarily illuminate, but certainly impresses.
Outdoor furnishings that usually look quite simple during the day have a tendency to lighten up with a soft dispersed glow from within at night.
Contemporary pieces, however, become more and more intricate like this polygonal Meteor garden bench that can also double as a coffee table from Serralunga.
As more and more stone options became available in kitchen design, more designers realized that materials like onyx and quartz could really benefit from backlighting.
Thanks to the structure of these stones, light travels through them quite easily showing off their textures and patterns literally in the best light.
LED Backlit furniture
While most LED furniture looks like Cassoni’s Quadrat ottoman, more intricate shapes are making way into backlit furniture design.
Lighted cubes, however, aren’t the worst garden decorations you can find. They are also easy to style and arrange.
Here is an example of a different LED seating shaped and named after a pillow. It looks quite intriguing too, creating beautiful inconsistencies in lighting.
Matching tables and separate seats create a fitting arrangement for the Pillow chair, and the spherical lamps always make outdoors shine at night.
Looking like a coffee table and shaped as a lamp, Atollo ottoman is a piece you’d expect to see in an outdoor cafe.
Available in a range of colors, it makes a step in a tasteful direction, and is bound to bring style to any outdoors.
The best thing about a lighted outdoor table is that you don’t have to fuss with outdoor lighting. You can just light it up and enjoy a drink with friends in the privacy of your backyard or balcony.
Atollo bar table looks a lot like Atollo ottoman only taller, thanks to which it truly looks like a floor lamp rather than a table.
Outdoor Designs
As if to prove that LED outdoor furniture designs can look stylish, Cassoni designed this futuristic FAZ lounger that looks like a part of a flying car.
Equipped with a soft-lighted base and a protective door that doubles as a sun awning, this swimming pool daybed is an ultimate summer outdoor furnishing.
Serralunga assures that backlit furniture can also look traditional and chic. Their Sirchester sofa and armchair assume the look of a leather set during the day, but light up with white shine at night.
The set looks so convincing, it can be used indoors with its white glow serving as ambient lighting during the night.
A lighted bench is the best compromise when you don’t want to fully furnish your backyard but also require some light on your path.
Futura looks especially cool thanks to its contemporarily minimalistic design. Perched on a metal base, the bench appears to be levitating.
Bplan goes a different way about their designs. Instead of using plain-looking polyurethan, the firm cuts out decorative patterns from metal and uses light to project and highlight those patterns.
These garden stools are definitely much more decorative just as they are, but become even lovelier when lit from within.
Illuminated Mirrors
Not only furniture can look good with backlighting. A backlit mirror has a certain charm about it. It often gets a more contemporary vibe from backlighting, perhaps due to its minimalism.
Delatour Design Lab’s round simple mirror stands out especially thanks to the concrete it is hanging from.
Bathrooms can often benefit from dispersed lighting. Since it illuminates the walls, there is less shadow, hence the room looks radiant and museum-like.
Marble looks extra beautiful when it’s lit up with white fluorescent light. Of course, the stones of other colors might require different lighting.
Not a fan of a museum quality or contemporary minimalism? There are options still. Some mirrors come with lighted halo frames, and can not only decorate but help you feel like a Hollywood star.
These mirrors look great in modernist, Art Deco as well as traditional interiors.
Backlit Kitchen Islands
If you think kitchen can’t look more museum-like you may be convinced otherwise thanks to backlit stone kitchen islands and backsplashes that are all the rage now.
It might cost you, but a white quartz kitchen island radiating with white light is capable of turning any kitchen into palace.
The most popular stones for backlighting are onyx and quartz, but marble can, too, look quite designing with a little help from lighting.
Backlighting works not only for islands themselves but also countertops and wall inclusions.
Many onyx kitchen islands or bar counters are fully backlit to show off every minute detail.
Since onyx is usually yellow, it looks best backlit with yellow lighting. If you don’t like it though, you might be better off with white quartz
Onyx Backlit Furniture
Onyx is also a perfect fit for a home bar design. It’s luxurious, chic, and stylish. All you need for it is a hefty budget and a beautiful design idea.
This type of lighting is also very fitting for a bar, home or commercial. It’s soft but omnipresent.
Headboard design is an unusual use for onyx, but we’re glad the Studio Integrate Design went for it while designing their Magma bed.
The backlit headboard is not a novel idea, but how unconventional does it look in this onyx angled shape?
Designer Backlit Furniture
This one is no ordinary LED furniture piece. Architect Sotirios Papadopoulos decorated a sleek contemporary sideboard with a gorgeous moon drawing that glows in the dark, highlighting the celestial body.
Painted with ecological paint called ELI, the Full Moon makes for a lighted furniture alternative any home decor would snatch in a heartbeat.
Combining retro futurism and pure function, designer Pietro Russo came up with a quite genius idea of a night table that also emanates a soft yellowish light.
Practically a wall lamp, SAT has many more uses. It can be a night or a side table, an art object display, or a simple night light that activates as easy as a single hand motion.
Venturing further into designer furniture territory, we come across the Bright Woods that take away the prize for the best lighted furniture.
Masterfully inserting strings of light between wooden rings, the designers turn sleek wooden stools into a light show you’ll want to contemplate forever.
Stefano Giovannoni of Queebo likes to turn simple objects into furniture. Hence, the Rabbit Chair, that aside from metallic finishes also, comes in a backlit version. Available in an array of colors it can make any serious adult feel like a kid again.
Thanks to its aesthetic potential backlit furniture evolved from simple blocks of colored light into incredible pieces that can enhance every room in the house. But what do you think about this trend?
