Daycare Lighting: How Light Supports Orientation, Calm and Activity
Within just a few hours, a daycare centre has to support almost everything that lighting may be asked to do.
And that is exactly why daycare lighting is not simply a smaller version of school lighting.
Children move through spaces differently. They sit on the floor more often. They look upwards more frequently. Within minutes, they can shift between intense activity and retreat.
A good lighting concept needs to support these transitions – without constantly explaining the room through light.
What appears glare-free to an adult may sit directly within a child's field of view.
A child sits on a rug. Lies on their back. Climbs. Looks up into a skylight. Moves directly underneath a luminaire.
The relevant viewing directions are therefore far more varied than in an office or classroom.
Light sources and reflections need to remain comfortable even from very low viewing positions.
The ceiling is much more frequently part of a child's direct field of view.
Good glare control cannot work only from one fixed working position.
A retreat space requires a different brightness distribution from an active movement zone.
In spaces for children, there is often an immediate impulse to turn luminaires themselves into figures, clouds or other motifs.
That can work. But it is not necessary.
Simple forms that do not already tell children what they are supposed to see can be more interesting.
Circle. Line. Point. Surface.
At Kita Mittenwalde, Studio De Schutter deliberately avoided figurative representations.
Instead, simple geometric forms are arranged playfully. This creates a child-friendly character without making the lighting feel like decoration from a themed environment.
Group rooms are often used for very different situations over the course of many hours.
Crafting needs good visibility. Free play needs orientation. Story time does not need maximum general brightness. Retreat benefits from much calmer lighting conditions.
If everything is brought to one uniform lighting level, those differences disappear.
Different lighting tasks should therefore already be separated at concept stage:
- functional general light for active use
- calmer lighting for retreat areas
- vertical light for walls and spatial boundaries
- targeted lighting for tables and creative activities
- separate groups for daylight zones
The transition between activity and calm becomes easier when not every situation takes place under the same light.
Children move close to surfaces. Drawings are displayed on walls. Doors and spatial boundaries need to be understood intuitively.
At the same time, bright vertical surfaces strongly influence how open and legible a room feels.
In Mittenwalde, particular attention was therefore paid to wall lighting.
The effect is simple: the dimensions of the room become easier to read without necessarily requiring more and more light from the ceiling.
A room can feel visually brighter without every part of the floor being illuminated to the maximum.
Especially in a daycare centre, daylight is not simply free general lighting.
It changes. It creates shadows. It moves through the room. It makes the time of day visible.
Artificial lighting should therefore not constantly work against daylight.
In the multifunctional play hall in Mittenwalde, the skylights are emphasised by circular luminaires. These can be switched separately from the recessed spotlights.
Artificial light can therefore be added precisely where it is actually needed.
A separate switching group may sound unspectacular. In operation, it can matter more than an elaborate luminaire.
One colour temperature for the entire building is easy to specify.
But it is not automatically the best answer.
At Kita Mittenwalde, a deliberate distinction was made.
The heart of the building is the yellow movement room with its distinctive gabled roof. A linear luminaire with 4000 Kelvin is positioned centrally within the gable.
The slightly more neutral light supports the active character of the room during the day and complements the available daylight.
The remaining spaces, by contrast, were designed with 3000 Kelvin.
Warmer. Calmer. Better suited to areas where children spend longer periods or retreat.
The interesting question is therefore not: Which colour temperature does a daycare centre need?
It is: Which colour temperature supports the specific use?
Lying on the back.
Directly underneath the luminaire.
Looking diagonally upwards from the floor.
This is why the lighting in Mittenwalde was checked for glare from different positions – explicitly including the perspective of the smallest users.
For lighting design, that means:
- do not only evaluate standing adult positions
- check visible light sources from floor level
- position pendant luminaires outside critical movement and viewing zones
- consider reflections on light floors and furniture surfaces
- integrate luminaires safely and outside direct reach of children
Glare control in a daycare centre is not just a single UGR value. It is also a question of real body positions.
A darker corner is not automatically a good retreat space.
What matters is how the light is distributed.
Calm areas often benefit from light that does not come directly from one dominant ceiling source.
In Mittenwalde, small retreat spaces were therefore created with calming indirect lighting.
The difference is subtle:
The light is present. But the light source itself is less dominant.
The area gains its own visual boundary and becomes distinct from more active zones.
Public educational projects have budgets. That is not a side issue. It is part of the design task.
In Mittenwalde, simple standard recessed luminaires were used and made spatially more interesting through their arrangement.
Selected areas use so-called “Light Hacks” – project-specific solutions developed from affordable standard components.
One example is diffuse lighting mounted onto coloured wood-fibre panels, picking up the recurring motif of the circle.
Budget optimisation does not mean using the same inexpensive product everywhere. It means spending money where it makes a genuine spatial difference.
Functional lighting in a daycare centre does not mean that every lighting effect needs to be predictable.
In the bathrooms of the group rooms in Mittenwalde, dichroic filters were integrated into the skylights.
Depending on the angle of incidence, the colour of the incoming light shifts – from cooler blue to softer pink.
This detail does not perform the building's most important technical visual task.
And that is exactly why it is interesting.
Children do not experience light only as brightness. They discover change.
Good lighting design can reserve individual moments for that – without turning the entire building into an overloaded theme park.
Sufficient, well-distributed light for playing, crafting, eating and other active tasks.
More restrained light distributions and indirect light for retreat, story time and relaxation.
Doors, walls, cloakrooms and transitions remain legible without corridors needing to be maximally bright.
Artificial light supplements natural brightness selectively and can be controlled separately in sensible zones.
Bright walls support spatial understanding, displays of children's work and a more open impression of the room.
Individual lighting details can stimulate curiosity without turning the entire lighting concept into decoration.
- treating the daycare centre like a small classroom
- designing only from the eye level of a standing adult
- using the same colour temperature in every room
- treating activity and calm with the same lighting condition
- considering only horizontal illuminance
- leaving walls and vertical surfaces too dark
- planning daylight and artificial light independently
- turning every child-friendly idea immediately into a figurative motif
- not checking pendant luminaires and visible light sources from floor level
- making retreat areas merely darker instead of lighting them differently
- confusing budget optimisation with design arbitrariness
- making switching groups and controls unnecessarily complicated
A daycare centre does not need as much light as possible.
It needs different qualities of light for different moments of the day.
Good daycare lighting cannot be evaluated from the floor plan alone.
Walk through the room from several perspectives:
- standing at adult eye level
- sitting on a child's chair
- from the floor
- directly underneath the luminaires
- with full daylight entering the space
- on a dark winter morning using only artificial light
- during active and calm operating conditions
Do not only ask: Is it bright enough?
Ask: Does this light suit what a child is doing right here, right now?
For the “Gummibärchen” daycare centre in Mittenwalde, Studio De Schutter developed a lighting concept that combines daylight, functional requirements, retreat and playful elements.
Simple standard luminaires are deliberately arranged and supplemented at selected points with project-specific “Light Hacks”. The movement room uses 4000 K, while the remaining areas are illuminated with warmer 3000 K light. Skylights and artificial lighting can be switched separately in meaningful groups.
The most important reference point was not the luminaire – but the child playing underneath it.
View the complete Kita Mittenwalde project →
Daycare lighting should consider different activities, daylight, glare control, orientation and retreat. It is especially important to evaluate light not only from the perspective of standing adults, but also from the lower viewing positions of children.
Technical minimum requirements provide the foundation but are not enough for a good lighting concept. Crafting, playing, eating, movement and rest create different requirements. Zoned and controllable lighting is therefore more useful than one brightness level for every situation.
There does not necessarily need to be one correct colour temperature for the entire building. More active spaces can be treated differently from group and retreat rooms. Colour temperature, daylight, materials and use should be considered together.
Children often sit and play on the floor and look upwards from many more angles than adults. Light sources that seem unproblematic from a normal adult perspective may therefore sit directly within a child's field of view.
Daylight changes throughout the day and should be used intelligently. Artificial lighting can supplement it in separate switching or control zones instead of operating at the same output regardless of available daylight.
Retreat areas do not simply need to be darker. Indirect light, lower visual contrasts and restrained light sources can help distinguish them clearly from more active areas.
No. Simple geometric forms and playful arrangements can also create a child-friendly character. What matters more is whether light quality, glare control, use and spatial effect suit the children.
Standard products can be used where they work technically. Project-specific solutions should be concentrated where they create genuine spatial value. This allows the budget to be used selectively rather than uniformly.
Not through more decoration. Through better viewing angles, clear lighting zones and a considered use of daylight.
Studio De Schutter develops architectural lighting concepts for educational, workplace, hospitality and public spaces.
Support activity. Enable retreat. Reduce glare. Use daylight.
Lighting design from the perspective of the people who actually use the space.
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