There are, traditionally, two ways to introduce light into your home - with windows and with lights. Experiments with wrenching a gaping maw of a hole in your roof and letting the natural illumination of the sun flood in have been: unsuccessful, at best.
However, prepare your gob to be smacked: there is a third way. Beyond double-glazing and pendant ceiling lights, you can create the illusion of more light in your home with the right base.
Just ask David Bigland, managing director at interior flooring specialist Moduleo. Seeing as floors go in pretty much every room in the UK, David has seen his fair share of interior design trends, so knows the inside track on creating the illusion of space.
"Creating light and space in the home is easy with the right base," he says. "Stone or light, wooden-style floors offer the perfect canvas on which to introduce the current trends of bright colours."
And those design trends, for this year at least, focus on going bold. Clashing textile prints, striped wallpapers and designs and bright, zingy interior colours are all fun ways of making over a room.
But having a sensible canvas with all the basics in place is important before you go making your bedroom over like a barcode. As well as a solid floor in neutral wood tones or soothing stone and whitewashed walls, you need to get your lighting right as well. Flush ceiling lights fit into any ceiling and offer illumination without the dangly bits, and once you've decided on the decor of your room you can make a feature out of modern ceiling lights.
Not quite ready to turn your entire room into a zesty, stripy homage to 2012? Fear not: feature walls are making a big impact. Just decorating one room gives you the leeway to be a littler braver, playing with pattern and colour as well as texture and styles.
