For decades, many of our bathrooms suffered from the most basic – and disastrous – of lighting choices. The dreaded overhead spotlights were once the go-to default, a decision many interior designers bitterly disapprove of and one most homeowners are now coming to profoundly regret.
The spotlight’s first sin is just how nauseatingly unflattering the bright, overhead light is, casting harsh shadows that emphasize every flaw. Its second sin is the glaring lack of control: there is nothing more frustrating than trying to wind down for a hot, relaxing soak in the bath when your only options are total darkness or full-throttle, dazzling, bright-white floodlights. The crucial, corrective key lies in layering lighting – using multiple sources to achieve the perfect middle ground between task functionality and tranquil atmosphere.
If you are currently setting out on a bathroom remodel and wondering where to find truly inspired bathroom lighting ideas and where to buy bathroom lighting UK that will transform your daily routine and truly elevate your design, the time to ditch the spotlights is now. Forget the single source and embrace sconces, vanity strips, and dimmable warmth.
The places to shop for beautiful, timeless bathroom lighting
Here is our exclusive edit of the most esteemed bathroom lighting brands in the UK, everything you need to understand about their unique aesthetic, and the specific designs we recommend for achieving that perfect, flattering glow.
Drummonds
Every Drummonds bathroom is known for its delectably elegant and deeply sophisticated aesthetic, and their lighting offering is an equally sublime continuation of that ethos.
While Drummonds’ bathroom lighting collection is deliberately modest, it functions like the perfect capsule wardrobe for your interiors: comprising a few select pieces of truly timeless, classic, and always-in-style fundamentals. The overarching aesthetic is a clear nod to bygone, luxurious eras, defined by a refined sensibility of expert craftsmanship.
Each fixture is a sophisticated investment, featuring beautifully detailed metalwork and a protective, moisture-proof glass casing over the bulb, making them perfectly suited for the challenging, steam-filled environment of a bathroom. These are lifelong, inherently elegant additions that instantly elevate your home above the ordinary.
Best for: Vintage luxe style
Price: From £430
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Classic, timeless, and enduring. The shade itself is available in two glass options: clear and fluted.
Heathfield & Co
If your style gravitates toward luxurious, art deco-inspired, and genuinely striking designs, the Kent-based brand Heathfield & Co. is essential to know.
Their highly curated edit of bathroom lighting, engineered to meet rigorous safety standards for installation near water sources, features several distinct and wonderfully unconventional styles. Their selection of sconces, in particular, delivers a concentrated, flattering glow to a bathroom, and crucially, many styles are dimmable – which, in our opinion, is an absolute necessity, transforming the room from a utilitarian space to a true spa retreat.
What makes their collection truly fascinating is their unique and artful approach to lighting design. They specialize in uncommon fixtures that elevate the functionality of lighting to an expressive, decorative art form, ensuring your bathroom illumination is as stylish as it is atmospheric.
Best for: Sculptural lighting
Price: From £240
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More a piece of art than anything else. This beautiful design is high on our bathroom wishlist.
The Soho Lighting Company
The bathroom lighting collection from The Soho Lighting Company is a fantastic example of a hard-to-achieve blend: seamlessly marrying traditional elegance with a sharp contemporary edge.
There is a distinct, appealingly nautical theme woven through their designs, notably in the liberal use of brass. This brass, which develops a unique, rich patina over time – known as a 'living finish' – means the fixtures age beautifully, in fact looking better and more customized the longer they remain in your home. Nearly all of their lighting features elegant fluted glass, the perfect companion to the developing brass finish. The two materials combined achieve a wonderfully retro-luxe look, making them the ideal, character-filled antidote to mundane, unflattering spotlights.
While The Soho Lighting Company offers a selection of handsome sconce lights, it’s their pendant lights that truly pack a punch. Pendants are seldom seen in bathrooms, but they can be extraordinarily stylish and serve a crucial function: softening the overall look of the space. Given that bathrooms are often dominated by hard, shiny surfaces, these fixtures introduce interesting textures and shapes. Although their pendant lights aren't IP rated, for those with a larger bathroom, they are worth considering, as they are safe to hang as long as they are placed 2.4 meters away from any water source.
Best for: Art Deco-inspired lighting
Price: From £120
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Modelled on a rare 1900s vintage moulding, this striking pendant is simply breath taking.
Original BTC
Original BTC, a truly exceptional British company, stands out in a world of mass mechanical production. They use centuries-old techniques to painstakingly handcraft every one of their beautiful lights, all locally in Oxfordshire – with the exception of their beautiful bone china lights, which are still made in Stone on Trent, the heart of the British ceramics industry.
This commitment to local, handcrafted design details is absolutely crucial to so many homeowners today. The bathroom lights on offer at Original BTC are distinctly edgy and cool, which look perfectly at home in modern and contemporary interior design schemes.
However, they also do a wonderful job of providing a sophisticated, industrial cut against more traditional or maximalist looks, serving as a wonderful juxtaposition that adds immediate interest and a genuine point of difference. If you want to get a foothold on what lighting styles are absolutely bang on trend and exceedingly stylish right now, their site offers inspiration in abundance.
Best for: Contemporary lighting
Price: From £199
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This beautiful bathroom light is available in three finishes – polished brass, chrome and weathered brass. Each has a slightly different aesthetic tone, but each is beautifully made.
Pooky
If you feel an uncontrollable urge to buy everything in sight when you browse the Pooky website, rest assured – you are not alone.
This brand is a genuine design force, with so many of us adorning our houses with their fixtures, yet their collection manages to deliver perfectly judged designs every single time. Despite being one of the industry's go-to brands, Pooky’s almost infinite variety of shades and fixtures means it is highly improbable you will ever see your specific choice in somebody else's home.
The clinical nature of bathrooms can often leave them feeling cold and soulless, but Pooky lights are always unerringly characterful, injecting large quantities of personality into the space. For their ability to reliably warm up a room and add genuine charm, they are an absolute must-have.
Best for: Trend-led lighting
Price: From £45
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Pooky describes this design as a 'little Labrador puppy of a wall light!' – that is to say, it will really just suit any bathroom down to the ground.
Rothschild and Bickers
Interior trends are, by their very nature, ephemeral. However, when investing in items that sit at the luxury end of the spectrum, the trick is to spot those that deliver far more than immediate allure – those special items that can genuinely be cherished over a lifetime. Rothschild and Bickers produce truly swoonworthy bathroom lights that achieve exactly that, and it is this commitment to enduring quality that places them firmly in the pantheon of design greats.
Every light in their bathroom collection is meticulously crafted from mouth-blown glass. This artisanal process is what gives each piece its distinctive coloring and unique shape, ensuring that no two fixtures are identical. While every light in their collection possesses a powerful, timeless appeal, they are far from understated or muted. This stands in direct contrast to the popular belief that only simple design can be enduring.
Instead, these fixtures are opulent decorative flourishes with recognizable, formative influences: think the decadent, glamorous maximalism of Victorian boudoirs blended with the voluptuous, organic shapes and trims of Art Nouveau. They are an investment in expressive, sophisticated style that will never fade.
Best for: One-of-a-kind pieces
Price: From £494
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Cupid has well and truly fired his arrow. What a divine thing this bathroom light is. The glass (and the tassels) come in a plethora of beautiful colours.
Jim Lawrence
Jim Lawrence boasts one of the most impressive and expansive collections of bathroom lighting we’ve encountered. They offer an expertly curated edit that includes an unusually large variety of traditional yet strikingly refined pieces that will instantly prettify any bathroom, looking perfectly at home in town, country, traditional, or contemporary schemes alike.
Their collection features a vast selection of bathroom wall lights in a plethora of styles, alongside a thoughtful selection of bathroom ceiling lights. The ceiling fixtures, in particular, showcase an attractive waterproof cable and are crafted from solid natural brass. Crucially, Jim Lawrence treats this brass with a specialized antiquing solution to intentionally speed up the natural tarnishing process. This technique achieves that desirable mottled patina, resulting in wonderfully soft and unique organic patterns on the surface – a testament to quality craftsmanship and enduring style.
Best for: Large selection of classic designs
Price: From £190
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We love the decorative scallop shell back plate and traditional fabric shades for an alternative look to your bathroom lighting scheme. These innovative wall lights have been cleverly designed with a sealed glass cover over the bulb to ensure they are waterproof and fully functional in a bathroom environment.
Holloways of Ludlow
The necessity of strict bathroom lighting regulations often forces lighting brands to offer a limited, frustratingly small collection of fixtures. However, this scarcity absolutely does not ring true for Holloways of Ludlow, which provides an abundant, ample choice with its bountiful collection designed specifically for bathrooms.
The overarching aesthetic expertly recalls yesteryear, lending an inherently welcoming and familiar feel – a look that is classic, yet effortlessly style-forward. Crucially, their sheer variety caters to every taste, with several striking contemporary pieces dotted throughout the collection for those who prefer modern decorating.
So substantial is their collection that there is very little chance of not finding the perfect fixture – they even offer specialized sauna lights, ideal if the concept of Hygge and a spa-like retreat is your goal. Their website is information-dense, making it a highly reliable resource for making a stylish and sensible choice if your bathroom is in dire need of a sophisticated style injection.
Best for: Affordable luxury
Price: From £75
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Create a beautiful, unexpected style combination with this light. It has a contemporary edge with a hint of Dickensian charm.
Corston Architectural Detail
Corston Architectural Detail is a brand that may have flown under your radar, but it is one well worth getting acquainted with immediately. They have perfected a range of clean, unfussy, and ultra-chic lighting designs that instantly convey a sense of quiet elegance and restraint.
Their bathroom lighting collection is specifically designed for use in zones two and three of the bathroom, ensuring essential safety compliance. Each piece features a pared-back, exceedingly sophisticated silhouette with enduring appeal.
For a brand with such a forward-thinking, design-led aesthetic, you would be forgiven for expecting steep prices. However, their lighting is remarkably reasonable price-wise, offering genuine value for high style. As a final bonus, each of their styles is refreshingly customizable, available in your choice of bronze, brass, or nickel finish to perfectly complement your hardware.
Best for: Simple, timeless, and beautifully made lighting
Price: From £90
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How utterly beautiful. Use either side of bathroom mirrors for maximum impact, and it will feel like a 1920s deco-luxe space.
What is IP Rating and why do you need to pay attention to it?
Lee offers some insight in terms of lighting regulations; a bathroom is considered a special location for electrical installation. You just need to ensure your bathroom lights meet the IP regulations required, wall lights should carry a minimum rating of IP44, and a higher IP65 rating when closer to water.'
Charlie Bowles, Director of Original BTC, adds, 'IP stands for ‘Ingress Protection’ and is used to define the degree of protection provided against water to its electrical connections. You don’t have to use IP-rated lights in a bathroom if they are outside the zones, for example, more the 60cm away from the tap of a bathroom sink.'
Luckily, any good manufacturer of bathroom lighting should make it quite explicit on their site or in their showroom which lighting within this collection is suitable for bathrooms.
What bulbs work best for bathroom lighting?
Lee advises we first decide precisely how we want our bathroom to feel: 'Do you want your bathroom to feel warm and cosy or bright and light? Allow this to lead the way in choosing the colour temperature to ensure you create the appropriate ambience for the room.'
'Equally, for applying makeup, you need your bulbs to have a high CRI (Colour Render Index). CRI is the degree to which your artificial light represents true daylight, with 100 CRI being the truest form. The average UK bulb is level 82 CRI, and ours are the highest available 95-97 CR, so you will not leave the bathroom with unseen toothpaste on your cheek or needless shaving cuts!'
How and why to layer bathroom lighting?
Layering lighting essentially means giving yourself more choice and is the key to well-thought-out and well-executed lighting ideas.
Where 'task lighting' is required, bright, even harsh light is a necessity - maybe in areas where we apply makeup or inspect that relentless chin hair that won't get the message. But on the whole, the bathroom is a place to soothe, relax, and unwind, so setting the tone with warmer, softer, ambient lighting is ideal.
A candle sconce is a wonderful addition to any bathroom, so too are rechargeable and portable lamps, which require no electrical feed and allow you to read a book in the tub without squinting. They also help to make the bathroom feel more relaxed and in keeping with the rest of the house. Bathrooms needn't feel clinical and lifeless.
Charlie notes that we should 'treat lighting in the bathroom as you would any living area: bathrooms are now as much relaxation spaces as practical spaces, so consider your lighting at the planning stage to create a bathroom you’ll enjoy for years to come. What’s more, materials are just as important as style when choosing lighting for your bathroom. Choose materials that bring natural, relaxed softness, such as bone china. Layering hand-crafted, natural textures and finishes brings warmth to your scheme, all while being timeless and characterful.'
