For $225 an hour, Marissa Tucci will come into your newly remodeled home at night and adjust your light fixtures. 

As one of San Francisco’s top lighting designers, she is paid to make her clients’ living spaces sparkle, and perhaps improve their sleep and general well-being in the process. 

“You’re spending all this time picking out the perfect flooring and the paint on the walls,” Tucci said. “If the lighting is off, it’s going to throw all of your investment off.” 

After the construction is finished, the furniture moved in and the art mounted, she and her team visit for six to eight hours after dark to aim every single fixture, even changing the inner optics to narrow or widen the beam of light. They might settle on a 3,000 K temperature to best showcase a black-and-white art piece or set the brightness in a bedroom to 85.2%. 

In luxury home renovations, professional lighting design is no longer thought of as a nice-to-have aesthetic upgrade. It’s a key part of the “wellness” design trend, along with whole-house water and air filtration systems, in-home infrared therapies, and biophilic touches like living plant walls.

Growing awareness of the sleep-depriving dangers of blue light from screens has put lighting near the top of the list for healthmaxxing homeowners.

The Bay Area is ground zero for new lighting technology, from 3D printed custom fixtures to AI that can predict which rooms we’ll want lit up, and how, before we enter them. It’s all in service of triggering specific emotional and physical responses to help with sleep, make you a better party host, or create a feeling of zen — without any active awareness of what’s causing those changes in mood.

“It’s happening automatically or with the press of the button, but it’s creating this scene that is extremely customized to the way you live,” Tucci said. 

Ten years ago, none of Tucci’s clients had opinions on ideal bulb color temperature. Now, a growing number of homeowners are bringing Tucci into the renovation process earlier, asking for emotive lighting “scenes” and knowledgeable about wellness trends like “circadian lighting,” which mimics natural changes in daylight throughout the day.

Proponents of circadian lighting believe it makes getting out of bed in the morning less of a groan and keeps you in a deep, resting sleep for longer. It can be particularly useful for those with unorthodox schedules or those who are battling the blue light scourge blamed for everything from insomnia to headaches to skin hyperpigmentation. 

Ideally, Tucci and her team come in as the home’s schematic drawings are being created and refine the design as renovations continue, leading up to the “wow” moment after they’ve finished their evening house call. 

It’s the part of the process that clients fight most, she said, given that they just want to move in and start living in their new home. It’s also the part they end up appreciating the most after it’s done. 

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“That’s the time when clients say, ‘I know why I hired you. This is so worth it. I can’t believe I doubted it for a second,’” she said.

For one Russian Hill client, most of the work during pandemic-delayed renovations was detailing how to hide fixtures and layer light sources to showcase the art collection and bay views.

The owners now use their lighting schemes as a “party trick” when entertaining, they said, quickly setting the mood or hitting the “all off” switch for a dramatic presentation of the twinkling lights from Alcatraz through their living room windows.

They’ve never had a guest visit without commenting on the lighting, they added.

Dan Pelsinger, a general contractor and co-founder of Matarozzi Pelsinger Builders, said he often hears from clients who decide they want an extensive lighting overhaul added to their renovation after a jealousy-inducing experience at a friend’s home.

Adding in these behind-the-wall upgrades can easily double the electrician’s bill, he said, which can tick up to $250,000 for some Pacific Heights mansions. There’s added complexity after the job is done, since troubleshooting usually requires a visit from the lighting system expert. 

“Especially the younger clients really want to have a very robust lighting control system, and that requires more wiring,” he said. “It’s all computerized, and it’s very complicated.” 

With culturally significant art collections to display and high-profile entertaining schedules, these clients find the added expense more than justified as part of seven-figure renovations. 

“They want to be able to affect their environment and moods,” Pelsinger said. “Lighting is really critical.” 

Ian Yang describes himself as a “huge lighting nerd.” He knows the number of lamps in the average American home (10) and has strong feelings about the perfect temperature for lightbulbs (2,700 K for relaxing, 3,200 K for stimulating creativity).

He was in software before founding Gantri, a company based in SoMa that sells its own line of fixtures as well as creating bespoke pieces for other designers. They’re all made by 3D printing with a biodegradable, sugar-cane-based polymer. Each piece is made to order, which could mean anything from a custom lamp produced in the hundreds for a hotel to a one-off item that — even with the $12,000 set-up cost to print a new design — is a relative bargain compared to other custom fixtures. “Design should be personal,” Yang said. “You don’t have to be constrained by what’s available on the market. You can make it into what you want.”

The company launched about a decade ago, but sales really surged when the pandemic trapped people inside their homes with little to contemplate except their declining mental health. Yang is all in on circadian rhythms and argues for lighting’s  “primordial” qualities that stretch back to when our cavemen ancestors sat around a bunch of burning sticks for warmth, protection, and community. 

“Think about a little fire in a cave. We want to give you that feeling that your home is really this haven where you can be calm and zen,” he said. 

Gantri fixtures are smart home enabled, even their new wireless line, and Yang believes we’re only at the beginning of using tech for home customization. He called lighting a “great vehicle for smart home management” simply because there are many fixtures in each home, versus just one Siri or Alexa, so the automation is easier to dial in and personalize by room or task. 

“You have so many lamps at home,” he said. “How can you make that experience more integrated, more seamless, more beautiful?”

The answer to that question, according to Jason Johnson, is AI.

As one of the inventors of the August Smart Lock, Johnson has used technology to solve the basic human problem of forgetting your keys.

“Once you experience it, it’s really that little bit of magic,” he said. 

Now he’s trying to bring automation and predictive technology to the whole home with Doma. The SoMa-based company is outfitting new developments with doors and windows equipped with cameras and radar to determine when a room is occupied and by whom. The technology automatically connects to smart lighting systems like Lutron so the house starts to learn the patterns of its occupants. 

​​”As we’re capturing the data of the various members of that household and their daily activities and movements, we’re getting more and more smart about being able to have the house be responsive to their personal needs,” he said.

A homeowner returning from the store with bags of groceries could have the door authenticate their identity and swing open, while lights come on ahead of them, guiding them to the kitchen. A child could have one lighting scheme for playtime and another for napping, with the millimeter wave radar in their windows sending a message to the fixtures about which activity is taking place.

Tucci said some of her techie clients love the idea of intelligent lighting, while others, even those who work in AI, are more wary. Some are even turning away from the lean, minimal look of earlier lighting control panels and returning to a more tactile toggle switch.

Whether her clients are leaning into the latest tech or not, Tucci recommends giving lighting “some real sit-down thought” before the walls are closed up and the opportunity has passed.

Technology can be a major boost to our lives, Johnson said, but only if it works.

He has a smart lighting system in his home but admits it has its issues. Once, he was away and his wife couldn’t turn off the kitchen lights without dismantling the control panel. 

“For more than 100 years, we’ve been manually turning on and off light switches as we come and go from rooms,” he said. “Whatever we touch in the home, it has to be 100% as reliable at doing what it did before it had electronics and software.”