How Lighting Makes Rooms Look Bigger and Beds Look Cleaner

Bright rooms measure wider

This comes from perception research. In a controlled 2018 study in PLOS ONE, Hecht and Oberfeld put 20 participants inside full-scale stereoscopic room simulations and varied the wall colours. Rooms with bright side walls were judged 7.88 cm wider than the same rooms with dark side walls. Rooms with bright rear walls were judged 6.84 cm farther away. When dark surfaces dominated, rooms read as smaller still.

Twenty participants and simulated rooms is a small base, so read the exact centimetres as a direction and not a promise. The direction is clear: light makes a space feel bigger and darkness makes it feel smaller. A dark listing photo tells guests your rooms are smaller than they are.

Source: Hecht & Oberfeld, PLOS ONE 2018.

Brightness reads as cleanliness

A 2021 review of hospitality research by Magnini and Zehrer collects a striking result: places with debris in them were judged cleaner when brightly lit than the same places dimly lit. The review concludes that, all else equal, bright lighting is associated with cleaner perceptions. It also reports that venues with solid white bedding are seen as cleaner than venues with coloured or mixed bedding.

So shoot bright and style the bedrooms white. Both are a fair way to present a clean room in the light that shows it.

Source: Magnini & Zehrer, 2021 (review full text).

White bedding as a trust signal

• When the WoodSpring Suites brand moved to all-white bedding, it said it had consulted more than 12,000 guests and 1,300 room audits. The reason was trust: guests weren't confident that coloured comforters had been washed. An executive put it bluntly: "We had to go to white to prove to them it's clean." The brand's research also found existing guests would pay 20% more for the refreshed design, and 25% for the target group. These are brand survey results, not an independent experiment.
• A 2021 study in the International Journal of Hospitality Management (Yu, Seo and Hyun; 314 usable survey responses) built a hygiene scale that includes laundering towels, bed covers, blankets and pillows. Hygiene perceptions of guest spaces strongly predicted a hotel's image, which in turn predicted revisit intention.
• A survey commissioned by P&G Professional and reported by the Institute of Hospitality found 78% of hotel guests rated cleanliness the most important factor in choosing where to stay. Dirty bedsheets were the most likely reason to walk out (71%), followed by a disgusting bathroom (69%) and a smelly room (65%). It is a commissioned industry survey, so a strong signal but not peer-reviewed.

Sources: LODGING Magazine on WoodSpring · Yu, Seo & Hyun, 2021 · Institute of Hospitality, 2019.

A note on made beds and neat towels

We looked for a study that isolates "a neatly made bed in a listing photo" as the cause of more bookings, and found none. No verified research credits the made bed itself. What is documented is what surrounds it: white bedding reads cleaner, brightness reads cleaner, and cleanliness dominates the booking decision. A made bed shot from the doorway, with crisp sheets, plumped pillows and folded towels, is how hotels present a clean room, and it passes a guest's two-second cleanliness check.

What you must not do is photograph a room cleaner than it is. Enhancement corrects light, colour and geometry. It should never manufacture the look of cleanliness over reality.

The capture routine

• Shoot during the day, ideally in the flat light of late morning or an overcast afternoon. Airbnb's own photography guidance calls soft natural light warm and welcoming, and advises opening blinds and curtains and switching lights on if images stay dark.
• Turn on every lamp before you shoot. A mix of dark and bright areas is what makes interiors look smaller than they are.
• Make the bed hotel-style first: crisp sheets, plumped pillows, folded white towels beside the bed and not on it.
• Shoot the bed from the doorway, so the window light, flooring and space around the bed all carry the cleanliness signal.
• Keep colour consistent across the gallery. One yellow bedroom beside a neutral living room undoes the effect for both.

Source: Airbnb photography guidance.

What Superphoto adds

Superphoto's enhancement was built around these findings:

• The standard enhancement raises brightness, opens shadows and neutralises yellow and blue casts across the photo, without repainting your materials.
• Turn On the Lamps makes visible lamps look lit, with a warm glow.
• Window view recovery keeps what is outside the window visible while the room brightens, which makes rooms feel open and not sealed.
• Ironed Bed Sheets (Hotel Look), Hotel-Style Towels and Remove towels or slippers from the bed give you the hotel bed presentation on your own photo. You approve the result.
• Blue Sky Windows (experimental) fixes a grey sky on the day you shot.

Our guide to amenity photography goes further into coffee moments and lit fireplaces, and the iPhone guide covers the capture technique.