Do You Have The Right Kitchen Lighting?
The kitchen truly is the heart of the home. With today's open floor plans, where the family room living room, dining room and kitchen all blend into one great room, kitchen lighting is more important than ever.
Lighting Basics
The general principles of lighting design apply as much to kitchens as they do to any other room in the house. Generally speaking, every room needs three different kinds of lighting: general lighting, task lighting, and accent lighting.
The Kitchen Needs General Lighting
Think of general kitchen lighting, sometimes called ambient light, as the light that comes on when you flip a switch. You need general kitchen lighting so you can see what you're doing as you walk through a room.
The light that flows into the kitchen through skylights and windows is ambient light. In the kitchen, even if you have lots of windows and skylights, you also need artificial light so you and your family can use the room after dark.
Overhead lights usually supply the general lighting in a room. In a kitchen, you can install recessed lighting for a modern look. Recessed lighting is flush with the level of your ceiling, so light fixtures don't hang down into the room. Besides being well suited to complement modern design, recessed lighting is recommended for kitchens with low ceilings, or if your décor is such that you do not want to call attention to your general kitchen lighting.
A popular alternative to recessed lighting is to use decorative light fixtures like chandeliers on the ceiling of the kitchen to provide general lighting. When you use decorative light fixtures, you can select fixtures that match lights and lamps in adjacent rooms, bringing a consistent look and feel to your décor.
The Kitchen Needs Task Lighting
The kitchen is the hardest working room in the house. Where else in the home do you work with water, fire, and food?
The chores for which you need task lights in the kitchen aren't just food preparation chores like chopping, peeling, and cooking food. You also have to put away groceries, clean countertops, wash dishes, and pack lunches for work and school.
Most of this work gets done on kitchen countertops, so it is important that you have sufficient light so you won't cut yourself or miss a greasy spot in cleanup because your kitchen lighting is too dim.
The easiest way to provide task lighting in the kitchen is to install small halide lights on the bottom of the cabinets above the countertop. These small spotlights provide strong, bright light, uninterrupted by the shadows that break up general overhead light.
Accent Lighting For The Kitchen
The most popular use of accent lighting in the kitchen is to hang decorative pendants over a granite-topped island. Accent lighting is not meant to be functional; it is supposed to enhance beautiful objects, like natural granite stone.
Use all three of these types of lighting in your kitchen, and you will solve any kitchen lighting dilemma.
