Ready to roll up your proverbial (or literal, I suppose) shirtsleeves? This series is all about helping aspiring residential lighting designers, architects, interior designers, and DIY homeowners get better light in their homes. If you want to know why this is important and dig into the theory behind this series, check out the Simple Gift of Light series.
I intend to provide more technically-focused guidance in this series while avoiding the all-to-common trap of techo-babble that is more likely to confuse than help. I doubt I will find the perfect balance between accessibility and technicality in the very first post, but that is the point of writing this series: I will get better as I write and learn.
Why am I starting out with what could be labeled the toughest space of all, the kitchen? The kitchen is the hub of our household, a gathering place and the room where my partner cooks amazing meals (I am, stereotypically, competent as a dishwasher, pouring drinks, and sometimes heating things). Our kitchen, like most kitchens, had poor lighting when we moved in, just a single large overhead fluorescent-like light. Ugh. The living room was similar, but it was easy to plug in a few table and floor lamps and make a huge difference. With limited counterspace, that wasn’t a great option in the kitchen. In other words, we need to get kitchen light right in the beginning.
So here we go. I’ll start this post focused on how to PICK THE PLACES that light should go in the kitchen, then move on to how to PICK THE PRODUCTS in the weeks to come.
WORK ZONE WINNERS
I am currently dividing design strategies by Comfort Zones, Work Zones, Glare Zones, and Safety Zones. I personally lean towards Comfort Zones as being the most important, perhaps because they are the most overlooked, but in kitchens it makes perfect sense to start with the Work Zone. Where do you need the best light in a kitchen? On the countertops and work surfaces.
WORK ZONE: FIRST PLACE
My favorite strategy for illuminating work zones is to deliver strong, shadow-free light to the countertops from light mounted below my eye height to minimize glare. I can hide light in a variety of places, but underneath upper cabinets is the most common and easiest to execute, followed by linear lighting embedded in floating shelves. No convenient location? Consider adding a piece of horizontal wooden trim 16”-18” above the counters to conceal lighting.
Linear LED is our go-to solution because it comes in a huge variety of options at various pricepoints and can deliver strong light with minimal shadowing on the counters (more specifics on that later in PICK THE PRODUCTS).
It is worth paying extra attention to the range hood lighting, often built-in to the products themselves and therefore significantly more difficult to alter. Cooking surfaces need to be well-lit, and most hoods will block any overhead lighting.
WORK ZONE: SECOND PLACE
We need good strong light on kitchen islands for all kinds of tasks from preparing meals to completing homework or sorting mail. Recessed downlighting overhead will get the job done but pepper your glare zone with bright sources pointed towards your eyes, not the most comfortable solution.
If you have control over which pendants are used, this can be a great solution in the work zone because you can lower the pendant to eye height and shield the brightest part of the light from your eyes. Pendants that push strong light downwards and softer light in other directions check the most boxes.
WORK ZONE: THIRD PLACE
Now we get to placing recessed downlights (sometimes called can lights or pot lights) in the ceiling. Why third place and not first place? Because the other methods will deliver better lighting to the countertops with less glare in your eyes. Most kitchens, however, will need a healthy sprinkle of recessed downlights to fill in the gaps. These same downlights will serve another purpose when considering the Comfort Zone, which I’ll talk about in a minute, and that makes them even more useful.
Note the green haze on the countertops in the sketch- that is where we need the strong light in the Work Zone. Recessed downlights, then, should be directly over the green haze areas. I try to center them on upper cabinets, about 12” out from their face, less if a soffit provides restrictions. Over the sink, I center the lights on the countertop, usually 12” out from the wall. No, these won’t be in a straight line, but that’s because I am focused on getting the best light, not making the ceiling overly important.
In the sketch above I added four recessed downlights over the island, assuming there are still three pendant lights covering the middle. These are placed in the “gaps” between the pendants and, if the island is particularly large, I might have as many as eight recessed lights to push light to the surface. When paired with the pendants, these can often be dimmed to a more comfortable level while still providing good light.
WORK ZONE: HONORABLE MENTIONS (FOURTH PLACE)
There are a few other places in kitchens that can, periodically, qualify as in the Work Zone. When we open cabinets, pantries, and drawers, our “work” is to see what is inside and quickly find the desired items. Light helps us find the box of breadcrumbs in the back of a pantry and our favorite paring knife in the drawer, and light specifically for that task can add a luxurious touch to a kitchen.
Glass-fronted cabinets can have light inside, though it helps to have a dark finish inside the cabinet to help the items stand out from the background. My parents still live on the family farm in Illinois and have a large, deep pantry cabinet that has been around for, well, more than fifty years. A few years ago I ran linear LED strips vertically inside both sides of the pantry and the results are beautiful as well as functional.
I have seen plenty of kitchens with lighting inside every drawer and this seems at once a great and terrible idea. I would personally enjoy the ability to keep the overall lighting in the kitchen dim during the evenings and illuminated drawers and cabinets would boost functionality while minimizing glare. How lovely! Yet I worry that adding dozens more lighting locations in a kitchen – and locations that move and close – would be not only wasteful but also difficult to keep operating at 100%. Still, it gets an honorable mention.
With good under-cabinet lighting, island pendants that perform, recessed downlights in the right locations, and perhaps a few extras like light inside key cabinets, your Work Zone should be well lit. But there are three more zones to consider to maximize the benefits of light in a kitchen.
The Comfort Zone, what we see with our near field of vision, is the space taken up by the sky when we visit the waterfront or in the countryside. Like the sky, our homes benefit when this zone is softly and indirectly illuminated, meaning light is bounced off other surfaces.
COMFORT ZONE: FIRST PLACE
Recessed downlights come in an adjustable variety that I heavily favor in kitchens and throughout the house, and brightening up the Comfort Zone is among the most important reasons why. These may have come in third place for the Work Zone, but here they come in first for their versatility and utility.
The same downlights used over countertops, when aligned with upper cabinets and tilted a few degrees towards them, can do double duty of lighting the fronts of the cabinets and the insides when opened. When closed, light bouncing off the cabinet faces can be very comfortable. This is equally true for upper cabinets and full-height pantry cabinets, refrigerators, and wall ovens; light reflected off these vertical surfaces is very pleasing to the human eye.
COMFORT ZONE: SECOND PLACE
There are plenty of kitchens with open shelves (which reflect light poorly since they are so thin in appearance) and glass-fronted cabinets (which allow light to pass through the inside). Both of these areas can be strategically illuminated with linear lighting that bounces off the walls and shelved items and fills a room (and Comfort Zone) with soft light. A dark glass cabinet, or a series of shelves without illumination, will rob the kitchen of light where the sky should be, and that simply is not what our bodies crave. Be sure to point the lights away from your eyes; no one likes to be the deer in the headlights.
COMFORT ZONE: THIRD PLACE
The solutions above should cover most of the Comfort Zone but there are a few other possibilities for making this work best. Range hoods are sometimes quite large and ornamental, even becoming a centerpiece of an entire kitchen. When this is true, the range hood is taking up very valuable real estate in the Comfort Zone and will benefit from a little light. I like to catch the corners of the range hood (wider optics/beam spreads will help spread the light out more), most often with recessed adjustable downlights though occasionally linear lighting can be incorporated to achieve similar – and even more beautiful – effects.
Be careful when lighting stainless steel or highly reflective range hoods (or cabinets, for that matter), as the high gloss finish can reflect light uncomfortably. In those cases, take a step back from brightness and minimize what light you direct towards a range hood. Linear lighting embedded in the hood, shining upwards above eye level, is one way to avoid glare while catching the hood with lovely light.
COMFORT ZONE: HONORABLE MENTIONS (FOURTH PLACE)
Soft light in our Comfort Zone can also come from softly shaded decorative light fixtures like wall sconces and pendants. When I say “soft” I do not necessarily mean they have to be fabric, but they do need to diffuse the light in similar fashion. If you can see the light bulb, or the light source is visible and small like a thin linear pendant, you will be introducing glare into the comfort zone, and that will negatively affect your vision and mood.
Wall sconces can push light outwards and add soft glows to the walls, another bonus in the Comfort Zone. Just make sure they are easily cleanable, as grease can build up in cooking environments and be difficult to clean off fabric surfaces.
Whew. We have Picked the PLACES for lighting in the Work Zone and Comfort Zone. In the next post, we will Picked the PLACES for lighting in the Glare Zone and Safety Zone.