Lighting up cosy atmospheres in Denmark

This article explores the use of light to stage atmospheres in a residential area of Copenhagen, Denmark. Both natural and electrical lights enable visibility but they also impart a certain sense of place that influences the way people behave and feel. The article investigates how light is about more than individual perception and plays a crucial role in orchestrating a sense of community, solitude and ‘secureness’ at home. Such staging of atmospheres, it is argued, importantly relies on cultural premises and notions of intimacy, informality and relaxation, encompassed in the Danish term hygge, or cosiness. Light frames such sense of secureness and cosiness by allowing for visual oscillations between separation and connection of people, places and things. In this way, investigating the use of light in shaping atmosphere offers a lens to explore how connections and networks of people, emotions and things, shape the home and links interior and exterior spaces.