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©MoonlightDesign Ltd
©MoonlightDesign Ltd
Oct 14, 2026 . 12 min
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Written by David Haslehurst
A professional lighting design for a home in the UK typically costs between £1,000 and £5,000, and more for larger or more complex properties. At Moonlight Design every design is bespoke and unique to the client. We can quote for a lighting design from your plans without a visit, and where a site visit is needed before we quote there is a consultation fee, which depends on where you are. We travel anywhere in the UK and overseas. The design fee covers a CAD lighting plan showing the position of every light, an electrical layout with switch positions, a detailed specification and a lighting specification list. The lights themselves and the installation are priced separately, so you can see exactly what you are paying for at each stage.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is more useful, because the fee only makes sense once you understand what it buys, what drives it up or down, and what it saves you further down the line. This guide covers all of it, with no sales pitch beyond the facts.
Some lighting companies will give you a design price over the phone based on how many bedrooms you have. We do not, and we would be wary of anyone who does. A bedroom count tells you nothing about the number of reception rooms, bathrooms, hallways and landings, the ceiling heights, the glazing, the joinery or the garden, and those are the things that decide how much design work a house needs. A price per bedroom is a price for a template. It is not a bespoke design service.
To quote for a design, all we usually need is a set of plans. Architect's drawings or a landscape plan are ideal, but a clear measured sketch will often do. The plans show us every room and every space, and the scale of the project, which is enough for us to give you a fee for the design without anyone needing to visit.
Sometimes a visit is the right thing to do before we quote, for example on a complex renovation, a large garden, or a property where the drawings do not tell the full story. In that case two of our designers attend. One looks at the design: how you live, how the rooms are used, what you want to see and what you would rather not see. The other looks at the technical side: the installation, the circuits, the controls and how the scheme will actually be built. There is a consultation fee for that visit, which depends on where the property is, and we confirm it before we come.
Once you have signed up for the design, a site visit is sometimes worthwhile depending on the project, and we will tell you honestly whether it is.
The word "design" gets used loosely in our industry. Some lighting showrooms will offer a free layout if you buy their fittings. Some electricians will sketch downlight positions on a plan for nothing. Neither of those is a lighting design, and the difference matters when you are deciding what to spend.
When we quote a design fee, this is what it includes:
The fee does not include the fittings, and it does not include installation. We keep those separate on purpose. The design is an independent piece of work, so you are free to buy the lights from us or from elsewhere, and to have the scheme installed by us or by your own electrician working from our drawings.
Every property is different, so we confirm the fee once we have seen the plans. As a guide, our design fees fall into these bands:
These are approximate figures and the only way to get an exact price is to talk to us about the project. But they should give you a realistic sense of scale before you pick up the phone. If you are planning a kitchen and a garden, you now know you are looking at a few thousand pounds for the design, not a few hundred and not tens of thousands.
Four things move the fee more than anything else.
This is the obvious one. A five bedroom house with a basement and a landscaped garden takes many more hours to design than a two bedroom flat. More rooms means more drawings, more fittings to specify and more circuits to plan.
Size is not the whole story. A large open plan kitchen, dining and living space with a double height ceiling, a feature staircase and a wall of glass onto the garden is far harder to light well than three small rooms of the same total area. Vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, artwork, joinery, water and mature trees all take more design time because the light has to be worked out precisely rather than spread evenly.
Every scheme we design comes with a switching plan: switch positions, dimmers and zones. A scheme that goes further, with a full control system, keypads, scenes and timed events, takes more design time, and we will recommend one and advise on it where the project justifies it.
3D visualisations take time to produce. We include them when they will genuinely help you make a decision, for example on a large garden or an unusual interior, and we leave them out when a plan and specification tell the story on their own.
This is the part most people miss when they compare quotes. The design fee is almost always the smallest line on a lighting project. The fittings cost more. The installation costs more. And the cost of getting the lighting wrong costs far more than all three put together.
Consider what happens without a design. The electrician asks where you want the downlights. You guess, usually a grid. The ceiling is boarded and plastered. The kitchen goes in. Then you switch everything on and find the island is in shadow, the worktop under the wall units is dark, there is a glare spot on the television, and the dining table has a downlight directly above the seat at the head of it. The colour of the light is wrong for the room, so the warm oak you paid for looks grey. The whole scheme is too dim to cook by and too harsh to relax in, and the fittings themselves are simply not right for the space. Fixing any of that now means cutting into a finished ceiling.
A design costing £2,000 that prevents one round of remedial work has already paid for itself. A design that also stops you buying fittings you do not need, over specifying wattage, or running cables to the wrong places pays for itself several times over.
There is also a quieter benefit. A properly specified scheme uses the right amount of light in the right place, which usually means fewer fittings running at lower power than a guessed grid of downlights. Over the life of the installation that shows up on the electricity bill.
There is one more thing the fee buys, and clients often tell us afterwards that it was the most valuable part. It buys the right to stop worrying about lighting.
Choosing lights for a whole house is genuinely hard. There are thousands of fittings, a dozen colour temperatures, beam angles, dimming protocols, driver compatibility, IP ratings, and every supplier will tell you theirs is the one. Most people start with enthusiasm, spend weeks on it, and end up exhausted and no more confident than when they began.
A lighting designer takes all of that off your desk. You tell us how you want to live, we tell you what the lights should be, and we put it in writing so that nobody has to guess. Our designers know what they are doing. They have done it on a great many projects over 23 years, they know which fittings perform and which ones disappoint, and they will not specify something they would not stand behind. Trust that, and the lighting becomes one of the easiest decisions in the whole build rather than one of the hardest.
A fee is only good value if the people behind it know what they are doing, so it is worth saying who you would be working with.
Moonlight Design was founded in 2003 and has been designing and installing lighting for over 23 years. Our head of design, Alissa Fiordelmondo, is a qualified lighting designer who graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Macerata, Italy, and has led our design studio since 2018. That matters more than it might sound. Most people working as lighting designers in this country have come from an interior design or architecture background and are not qualified in lighting design itself. It is no accident that so many of the best lighting designers are Italian. Italy has treated light as a design discipline for generations, and the training reflects it. Alissa brings that approach to every scheme we produce. Our founder, David Haslehurst, has over 36 years of experience as a lighting designer, and our technical director, Phil Jackson, has worked in the lighting trade for more than 36 years and oversees every installation we carry out.
We are an award winning practice. Our own work received a German Design Award in 2021, and we were part of the team behind the Residential Project over £500K winner at the FutureScape Global Awards 2025. We have designed and installed the lighting for RHS Chelsea Flower Show gardens that won Gold Medals in 2017, 2019 and 2022, Best in Show in 2019, and the RHS/BBC People's Choice Award in 2016. Our work has been featured on BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and in The Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, Elle Decoration and House Beautiful. Our projects range from private homes and gardens to Glyndebourne, Dulwich College and the Hackett flagship store on Regent Street. You can see a selection on our projects page.
The design fee is the same whichever way the project goes. It is a fixed, transparent piece of work with a clear deliverable, and you decide what happens next.
We have our own team of electricians who specialise in residential garden and exterior lighting, and for those schemes we usually quote to design, supply and install the whole project. Because the designer and the installer sit in the same office, the scheme that is drawn is the scheme that gets built, and we commission it at night until it is right.
For interior lighting, commercial and architectural projects, the design is the core service and installation is your choice. Many clients already have an electrician or a main contractor on site, and in that case they install from our plan, electrical layout and specification, with us on hand to answer their questions. If you would rather we installed it, we will quote for that too. We can also source and supply the fittings as a separate service, so there is one lighting specification list and one point of contact for the whole scheme.
Send us the basics through our contact page: the type of property, where it is, which areas you want designed, and roughly when the work needs to happen. Attach the plans if you have them. If you have a design budget in mind, there is a simple range selector on the form. We will come back to you with a fee for the design, or, if the project needs a visit first, the cost of the consultation. If it is a garden scheme, we will give you an idea of what supply and installation might look like too.
The best time to do this is early. If you are at the planning stage of a renovation or new build, a lighting design done before first fix costs no more than one done later and saves a great deal of disruption. We have written separately about when to bring a lighting designer into a building project.
It depends on the project. Often we can quote for a lighting design from your plans. Where a visit is needed before quoting, two of our designers attend, one for the design and one for the technical side, and there is a consultation fee that depends on where the property is. We travel anywhere in the UK and overseas, and we confirm the cost before the visit. Once the design is under way, a site visit is sometimes worthwhile depending on the project.
No. The design is an independent service with its own value, and we charge for it in the same way whether you buy the fittings from us, from another supplier, or through your electrician. That independence is deliberate. It means we specify what is right for the space, not what we happen to have in stock.
Yes. A single room or area, such as a kitchen or a small garden, usually falls in our £1,000 to £2,000 band.
No. Installation is separate from the design and it is your choice. We have our own specialist team and we can install any project, large or small, inside or out. Our installers are best known for residential garden and exterior lighting, where we usually design, supply and install the whole scheme. For interior and commercial projects many clients already have an electrician or contractor on site who installs from our drawings and specification, and that works well too. Either way, the design is the same.
Yes. Every scheme, interior or exterior, comes with an electrical layout and a switching plan showing switch positions, recommended dimmers and zones. Where a project would benefit from a lighting control system, we will recommend one and advise on it as part of the design.
It depends on the size of the project and how quickly decisions are made at your end. We will give you a realistic timescale when we quote. What we would say is that starting early always gives a better result than rushing a design to meet an electrician who is already on site.
If you would like a fee for your project, get in touch with our design team. We are always happy to talk a scheme through before you commit to anything.
