Are You Lighting Your Kitchen Properly?

Find the Balance Between Comfort and Functionality With Luxury Lighting Design

The kitchen is sometimes called your home’s sun. Life revolves around it from early morning coffee to dinner with the family. Unfortunately, in some homes, it is a different kind of sun altogether. Lighting over the kitchen island, in particular, often uses blindingly high-wattage recessed cans or pendants strong enough to illuminate adjacent rooms. 

The result is a room that feels more like an operating room than a family hub. For a space that’s so versatile, it doesn’t make sense to rely on a few overpowering light sources. Instead, a layered lighting design gives the kitchen a more loungey feel while still providing task-oriented fixtures for meal prep or cleaning. 

Start With Functional Lighting 

The first thing you want to do is to move any high-intensity task lighting off the ceiling and directly where it’s needed. In most cases, we’d recommend undercabinet LED tape at a 4000K cool light ideal for chopping or seasoning. You’ll get focused lighting where you need it without flooding the rest of the room. 

For general ambient lighting, we usually use a combination of pendants and small-aperture pinhole lights. For the former, pendants help direct light onto the island itself rather than into people’s eyes. Pinhole lights let you spotlight specific work zones, while larger canned ceiling fixtures offer a soft, overall flow. 

 Elevate Your Kitchen’s Style

Once you have the general task and ambient fixtures in place, it’s time to focus on aesthetics. Your kitchen likely features some of the most interesting finishes and cabinetry, so don’t let it get lost in shadows. There are some really cool tricks to make your kitchen design pop. 

Toe-kick lighting illuminates the base of your island or cabinets to give a floating effect (and a perfect low-level nightlight for midnight water breaks). Vertical accents in cabinets or shelving could bring attention to any vintage china or collectibles in the kitchen. Wall grazing is also useful to highlight your unique marble or stone backwash. 

A cohesive lighting design should create drama through contrast, so all the fixtures in your kitchen shouldn’t be at the same intensity or color temperature. If everything is bright, nothing stands out. That leaves us with one final design tip: if you have any large chandeliers in the kitchen, they should be more decorative than functional and provide a soft, warm glow. 

Tie It All Together With Lighting Control 

If it feels like a chore to adjust the intensity and color temperature of the dozen lights in your kitchen, it doesn’t have to be. Your luxury lighting design should come with control options that let you create dedicated scenes. These instantly pull up preset layered lighting settings for any occasion and can be accessed through an app or engraved on-wall keypads. Here are a few examples: 

• "Prep Scene": Bright under-cabinet lights, focused island spots, 3500K neutral white ceiling lights.

• "Dinner Scene": Under-cabinet lights off, toe-kicks at 20%, pendants at a warm 10% glow, accent art lights on.

• “Daylighting Scene”: General overhead ambient lights automatically shift to match the sun’s “cool” hues in the morning and “warm” tones in the evening. 

Luxury lighting design is the difference between a kitchen that looks good in a brochure and one that feels good to live in. Is your kitchen lighting stuck in 'utility mode'? Let Innovative AV design a layered approach that makes it more beautiful and welcoming. Call us or fill out our contact form to learn more about our lighting design services.