Just make the HDRs darker, if they take too much away from the lighting. I tend to do use hdrs at like 30% strength and then add in some “style lights” but those are way stronger and usually even clip somewhere in the scene (e.g. they overexpose some parts of the image)
But it’s just a great foundation for starting to build your lighting. And it’s also, what we’re used to see from movies: have some realistic scene lighting, but then also some key light on the characters and important assets…
Example from my own work:
(ignore character Lighting) For the scene, Sun and LEDs make 90% of the lighting work and those are really basic. I didn’T even bother to use textures for the LED strips or the sun. Altough I’m now realizing I shouldt have put a shadow casting twig in the sunlights path…
But then I have a dim box with a purplish miscolored HDR on the inside and a totally outblown HDR on the outside.
Also … if you’re doing this because of the fridge … make it a central piece! Anything can be the starting point of a story. I once created a character just to have a story for a lighsaber.
One Tip for the object grunde: You can use object coordinates of diffrent objects in cycles! That way you can make the grunge dynamically move if you want to displace the object it surrounds.