Best party light ideas for your home

02/01/2025

Nothing beats a party at home with friends and loved ones. The food’s prepared, your space is tidied and the drinks are chilling on ice. But there's something missing... Smart light!

Whether you’re throwing a birthday bash, an intimate dinner soirée or a summer barbeque on the patio – party lights can really ramp up the celebrations by creating just the right colourful vibe, especially when you sync them to music. Read on to learn how to make Philips Hue smart lights dance along to your favourite party playlists and discover our top picks of Hue indoor party lights and outdoor party lights. Time to make your bash a glowing success!

Here are four ways to make your lights react to your music for the ultimate party experience at home. Choose the smart light sync that fits your audio setup best. All you need are colour-capable Philips Hue lights, a Philips Hue Bridge smart light hub and the Hue app.

Philips Hue + Spotify: With Philips Hue and Spotify, you get a deep lighting and music integration that intertwines light and sound. By matching the movement of light to the unique sounds of any song played with Spotify, you can throw parties where the lights dance right along with your guests.

Real-time digital processing instant audio analysis creates light scripts that match the mood and genre of the music. Customise the experience Choose from two styles — Classic and Pulse — and four intensity levels to personalise the music sync. You can also choose from five preset colour palettes or use the automatic setting, which selects the colours based on the song’s metadata. Link your Spotify account (including free ones!) directly in your Hue app using the Sync tab.

SmartThings audio sync: Add Hue Sync to your SmartThings app, so you can sync your Hue lights right from your Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Connect your Samsung Galaxy device to Philips Hue via SmartThings and let your lights react to your favourite music on your device.

Connecting your HDMI devices to a Hue sync box  doesn't just give you surround lighting for your TV and gaming devices - it gives you sync with music, too.

Sync music directly from your PC or Mac with the free Hue Sync desktop app . The Sync desktop app allows your Philips Hue smart lights to react to the content on your computer screen, like YouTube and Vimeo, or your music playlists. It uses a proprietary algorithm that analyses the entire screen or the beat of a song (depending which mode you use). It produces custom light script that is instantly sent to your color-capable Philips Hue lights.

Paint your party with smart light and add a whole new level of excitement and ambiance to any party or celebration at home. Whatever the theme, whatever the room - Philips Hue indoor party lights bring you a palette of 16 million colors to play with! More than enough colour combinations for any party theme. And when you sync your lights to react to your music, you'll create an unforgettable vibe that you and your guests will love. Turn your living room into a dance floor by swapping your regular bulbs for a combination of colour-capable smart bulbs like the E26 for table and pendant lamps and GU10s for your ceiling spotlights. This is the simplest way to fill your space with colour and recreate your favourite disco, bar or music venue. And the more bulbs you add, the more vibe you'll bring to the party! Add even more wow factor to the space with a combination of Signe gradient floor lamps  and Hue Go accent lights. The Signe produces multiple colors of light at the same time, resulting in a seamless gradient of rich, high-quality light. Each colour flows naturally into one another to create a truly unique effect, perfect for illuminating the corners of your room. Add even more pops of colourful party light to the space by dotting a few Hue Go accent lights around your tables, bookcases and shelves. Angle them towards ornaments, plants and pictures to highlight them in your favourite colours. When the lights aren’t dancing to the music, set one of Hue’s customised light Scenes across the bulbs and lamps. In the Party vibes gallery, choose from Ibiza, Malibu pink, Rio or Cancun – plus many more!

When your guests aren’t dancing, they might be chilling, chatting and snacking in the kitchen. So why not create a VIP lounge vibe with smart light? Strip lights are a great party light option for your kitchen space. They’re designed to be bent, shaped and cut to fit into any nook and cranny. So, they’re ideal for running under kitchen cabinets, countertops and baseboards to bring a sleek and stylish aesthetic to the heart of your home. You could also run LED strip lights along your hallway to give guests a bright welcome, or to help guide them to the bathroom or other party zones around your home.

Think of your back garden, front garden, porch and patio as 'outdoor rooms' just waiting to be transformed from blank canvases to colourful vibrant spaces made for celebrating. Give your guests a warm welcome by installing wall lights like the Resonate or Econic on your front porch or each side of your front door. Then set them to different colours to match the theme of the celebration so your family and friends know where the party is!

Use smart lights on your patio and in your back garden to create different party zones. Lily outdoor spot lights are the perfect fit for walls, beams and pillars and add powerful pops of colour, ideal for highlighting plants and picking out architectural features. Set them to any combination of colourful light if your patio becomes an impromptu dance floor, or tone things down with warm white light for an intimate meal ‘al fresco’. Lily spot lights can also be tucked into pots and planters or placed amongst shrubs and trees and pointed in just about any direction. Their light will add depth to your space while casting atmospheric shadows on lawns and fences.

Philips Hue outdoor lightstrips are another outdoor party light option. Strip lights can be bent and shaped to run along pathways, window frames and balustrades to create night-time sculptures and eye-catching focal points that your guests will love. And don’t forget, just like indoor Hue smart lights, outdoor lights can be synced to music in the same way.

String lights bring a magical twinkle to any party. Wrap them around pillars and shrubs on your patio for eye-catching pops of colour or white light, hang them from the living room ceiling for a starry sky effect or run them around door frames and furniture in your hallway or kitchen to create a disco vibe. There are millions of shades of white and colour light to experiment with, so the possibilities are endless!

Of course, you can also sync Festavia string lights to music and make the lights along the length of the cable, flash, dim, brighten and change colour in perfect harmony with your party playlist.

Festavia also comes with a host of unique lighting features. Choose from Linear and Scattered styles. Linear produces a seamless gradient of blended colour from one end of the string to the other. Scattered spreads up to five colours randomly along the string. For a more subtle look, set the string of lights to glow like candles, dance like fire or sparkle like stars – ideal for a romantic dinner party in the kitchen or a cosy gathering on the patio.

Festavia fairy lights are weatherproof, so they can be used both inside and outside your home all year round. They also come in three different lengths: an 8-metre cable with 100 LEDs, a 20-metre cable with 250 LEDs and a 40-metre cable with 500 LEDs.