Living in color

(Correction: Because of an editing error, the lead photograph in a graphic about LED lighting in Thursday's Life at Home section misidentified a chandelier manufactured by Swarovski as a model called Blossom. The chandelier pictured was Swarovski's Topograph by Karim Rashid.)

Evening falls in the Boatwright house: It's time for the light show.

The living room floods with blue light, and as John Boatwright twists a dial on the wall, it warms to purple, then red, and right on through the colors of the rainbow. If you were to stand out on the front lawn and watch through the Boatwrights' picture window, you might think aliens had landed on their sofa.

It's not aliens. It's the lighting of the future.

The new fixture in the cathedral ceiling of the cedar-shingle house that John and Barbara Boatwright have just built in central New Hampshire is a grid of LEDs, the shorthand for light-emitting diodes, a technology based on semiconductors that's evolving as quickly as your laptop.

''We love the lighting," says John, who considers himself ''an early adopter" when it comes to LEDs. The retired founder of a telecommunications company, he studied optics as an undergraduate at MIT. ''It's great for creating special effects. To that extent it's a novelty, but as time goes on it will blossom and be frequently found in residential and commercial applications.

''It's not to read by," cautions John. ''But for dramatic stuff, for background color or to highlight a painting, you can't beat it." The Boatwrights are spending the summer moving into their new home, so for the moment they're enjoying the razzle-dazzle and have yet to experience a downside to the lighting.

In the new dining room, John dials through the rainbow to demonstrate how LEDs illuminate two paintings, one of a loon and one of a mermaid. It's eerie to watch. Red flushes the mermaid's skin to a glowing pink; green makes the loon's head radiant.

Barbara enjoys the show. ''We were late in the game getting a color TV," she admits. ''We had a $15 yard-sale black-and-white TV until the 1980s. But John has always been interested in good lighting."

Since their invention more than 40 years ago, LEDs have gradually grown more powerful and become available in more colors. When a Japanese researcher created the blue LED in 1993, it meant that all colors could be created by mixing blue, red, and green, the primary colors. Boston-based scientists and businessmen George Mueller and Ihor Lys saw the potential of mixing colors, and in 1997 founded Color Kinetics, the first company to use LEDs for illumination. Until recently, most of their clients have been commercial: The flash and dazzle of LEDs light up Foxwoods casino and jewelry at Shreve, Crump & Low.

Now, they're making inroads into residential lighting. Color Kinetics outfitted the Boatwrights with their light systems.

LEDs are cutting edge for many reasons. They use less energy than incandescent, fluorescent, and halogen lamps, and they use it well: An incandescent bulb loses 90 percent of its energy to heat. LEDs are cool to the touch. They also last longer: Incandescent bulbs have a standard life of 2,000 hours; compact fluorescents last up to 10,000. LEDs never truly die; they just fade away, after somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours.

The initial cost is greater; an LED fixture requires a ballast component, and circuitry and frequency must be just right. White LEDs cost more than $50, compared with less than $1 for an incandescent bulb and less than $5 for fluorescent. It's fair to expect that prices will decline as LEDs become more commonplace. Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy estimates that under the influence of LED lighting, national energy consumption for lighting could drop by almost a third by 2025.

LEDs have moved from their infancy into an audacious adolescence. Saturated colors are in vogue commercially; stores use them to highlight their products.

''We're just beginning to use our lighting in living spaces," says Kevin Dowling, vice president of strategy and technology at Color Kinetics. ''Now we're doing highlights, accents, and decorative lighting."

Kathy Pattison, a former Color Kinetics employee who lives in the South End, loves the LEDs in her china cabinet. ''I wanted to have a choice of colors so I could set it to the appropriate mood," says Pattison. ''I can put on a rainbow show. It's always a big hit at parties." Pattison knew about LEDs because of her work, which she left this summer to be a full-time mom.

There are dozens of products on the market now, from bathtubs to chandeliers, which turn ordinary experiences into brilliantly illuminated ones (see sidebar). But as Boatwright pointed out, you can't read by a magenta light; work to create a white LED that's ready for the marketplace is incomplete. Color Kinetics estimates that LEDs will begin to be more widely used for general white lighting in three to five years.

Patricia Rizzo, residential applications specialist at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., agrees with that timetable. ''I would predict the first entree into the home will be under-cabinet lighting," Rizzo says. ''Even with all the products out there now, I haven't seen one that does a great job in terms of distribution of light and intensity of light."

Rizzo cautions that LEDs will not necessarily replace incandescents. ''It's not apples to apples," Rizzo says. ''We don't want to stuff LEDs in the same fixtures. They have to be integrated in a cove, in a valence. A downlight is not a great application for LEDs," which produce less light per watt than an incandescent bulb.

Last December, Color Kinetics introduced ''Intelliwhite," a white LED that the Boatwrights have installed over their kitchen counters. They can dial cool white (with a bluish hue) to warm white (more yellow), but there's a shallow quality to the light.

It doesn't bother the Boatwrights. ''I crank it all the way up on the blue side," admits John, ''although for most people that's not comfortable unless you're in an operating room, or displaying jewelry. You pick your poison."

John Powell, a Boston-area light artist who also does lighting design, has run into problems putting white LEDs in restaurant kitchens. ''Both times, the architect didn't like the efficacy," Powell says. ''People wanted to see the food properly."

Barbara Boatwright hasn't cooked in her new kitchen yet. ''I suppose if I saw an apple pie looking green, I'd say something's wrong," she says.

Unlike incandescent lights, LEDs operate along narrow wavelengths, and that changes the way we see things.

''Go in a shop and look for lipsticks, and you see many different colors of red," explains Norbert Hiller, vice president of Cree Lighting, a North Carolina company that develops LED products. ''But if you have one very narrow red light, and shine it on all the lipsticks, they will all look the same.

''When you're illuminating, you want to offer as broad as possible a set of wavelengths," Hiller continues. ''With narrow blue, green, or red, you'd only be able to see a narrow band of color." That's why the Boatwrights' paintings look so eerie under shifting LEDs.

Companies like Cree and Color Kinetics have been working on the problem, and the solution is to coat the white LEDs with phosphor, which broadens the wavelength -- although it still doesn't have the breadth and quality we're used to in incandescent lighting.

Even so, there's something alluring about the tiny, programmable lights, which are endlessly adaptable.

''People are going to love them in high-end residences," says Rizzo. ''They're robust. They won't break the way a regular lamp will. They're cool, sexy, stylish -- everything a fluorescent is not. They will have a great presence in residential lighting."

In the house of the future, Rizzo continues, LEDs will change the nature of light.

''When incandescent lighting came in, in 1879, the more important aspect of that invention was not the light itself," she says. ''The infrastructure changed. Buildings were electrified. LEDs will also change the way houses are built. We'll have glowing counters, glowing walls. You won't have fixtures."

Just as we haven't until now dreamed of cycling through colors in our china cabinets, much of the potential of LEDs is still beyond our imagination.

Downstairs in the Boatwrights' media room, they have a color LED setup and a new flat-screen television. Because television light, like lamplight, is projected, the color of the room it's in won't affect the tones on the screen the way they do those in a painting. The Boatwrights anticipate autumn afternoons watching football games with the atmosphere dialed to a warm tone, say peach or pale red. Something to nestle by.