Five of the Best Ways to Brighten a Dark, Windowless Room

Americans, on the whole, love space. Our houses keep getting bigger and bigger, and we keep inventing new rooms. Bonus rooms? Why not. Home theaters? Absolutely. And as anyone who has ever moved from a smaller home to a larger one knows...you will fill those rooms with stuff.

But we often turn to spaces that aren’t traditionally used for living—like dark, damp basements—and renovate them into usable living space; or we subdivide existing rooms to accommodate that extra child or invasive in-law. The end result is frequently a windowless space with the charm and ambiance of a holding cell.

Unless you can afford to make major changes to your house, you’re going to have to get creative if you want to brighten up a room that has no natural light. But you have options. Here are the ways you can deal with that prison cell in your house, in order of least to most difficult.

Use a sunlight light bulb for circadian lighting

The easiest thing to do in a dark, windowless room is to artificially replace natural light with a sunlight light bulb. These bulbs are calibrated to mimic the look of natural light, and can give your dingy space a warmer, more comfortable feel. You can even buy smart bulbs that can be programmed to replicate the rhythm of natural light (referred to as circadian lighting), dimming in the evening and brightening up slowly during the day. This isn’t a perfect replacement for natural light, but it can make a huge difference.

Use mirrors on the light you get from other rooms

If your dark room is adjacent to brighter areas of the house that do get natural light, you can bounce some of that light into your windowless hellhole with the strategic use of mirrors. This only works if you’ve got a door you can leave open, but adding a large mirror on a wall outside the room and mirroring light from another room can get some sunlight into the space. You can maximize this effect by painting the walls a light color with a glossy finish, and even installing furniture with reflective surfaces to keep light moving around the space.

Install glass doors or walls

If you’ve got the time, money, or skill set, you could consider replacing the door to your glum, windowless room with a glass door of some sort that will allow the natural light to penetrate from elsewhere in your home. If there’s a non-load-bearing wall you can tear out, you could also consider replacing it with glass blocks. These will allow light into the room without totally compromising privacy.

Use fake windows

If you’re pretty handy and willing to dig into a bit of a project, you could try installing fake windows. It sounds a bit crazy but can make a huge difference. The project involves taking some LED light panels that normally go on ceilings and installing them in recesses in your wall, then building a faux-window enclosure and trimming it out like a regular window. Want to go really nuts? Use something like a SkyCeiling panel from Sky Factory to really replicate the look of a real window in your dungeon-like space.

Add skylights

Finally, if your dark, windowless space can be renovated to include a skylight, you’ll be able to get actual natural light in there without the use of trickery and positive thinking. This may not be possible in a basement space, of course, but if your light-challenged room is on an upper level of the house, it might be worth looking into. Depending on a bunch of variables, this could be a DIY project for less than $1,000, although it does involve the nerve-wracking act of cutting a hole in the thing that keeps the rain off your head.

A dark, windowless room (or a room whose window looks out on a nearby wall) can be a depressing and unhappy place. The good news is, there’s a solution for a wide range of budgets and energy levels.