How to Choose the Perfect Kitchen Lights for Your Home
Lighting plays a crucial role in the interior design of any part of our homes. This is especially the case with the kitchen, much like the flooring and furnishings. This is a room where optimal lighting makes a difference between a well-prepped meal or one that’s enriched with one’s strand of hair.
Now that I got your attention with that image in mind, let’s talk about the four basic types of kitchen lights and how you ought to choose and play with them to get a nice, layered effect of illumination. Knowing this is of huge importance if you consider the well-chosen practical and energy-efficient kitchen light fixtures can also lower your carbon footprint, electricity expenses, and improve the look and feel of the room.
What Are the 4 Types of Lighting?
To be able to achieve the proper lighting you’re aiming for, you can’t expect to pick out just the one type that would do all the work, but rather:
Ambient
Also known as the all-over light option, ambient fixtures set the tone of the room and fill the gaps where natural light fails to provide illumination. This form of general lighting is supposed to provide a consistent level of light throughout the whole space so as such you’ve got the ceiling as your main area for installation.
There are plenty of options for ambient lights, differing in styles as much as sizes, meaning it’s your call whether you want to adorn your ceiling with flush mount or semi-flush mount kitchen light fittings or prefer to install something more traditional like builder-grade lights. Another jaw-dropping addition is to opt for a modern chandelier that doesn’t have the typical vintage allure but rather doubles as a sculpture and has some interesting odd shape that serves as a statement and adds drama and personality to the space.
To amplify the dose of sophistication and create a warm ambience as every kitchen ought to have as the heart of the home, you can also use the help of recessed lights. These are especially cool for people who don’t like hanging lights around. One of the great benefits of these is that they help you uniformly illuminate an area as they offer great coverage.
Task
Since ambient lighting is mainly for general illumination of the space, you’ll likely need something else if you’re doing more specific tasks in your home. Leaving the kitchen only to be illuminated by ambient lights won’t make it more practical or functional when you’re trying to prepare a new recipe for dinner and you can’t read all of the ingredients properly.
Instead, you need something that would provide enough light for the counters where you’d do most of the food prep which calls for the job of task lights designed to assist by reducing eyestrain.
Again, here you can count on the help of a few well-positioned recessed lights above the counter. You can also enhance the effect if you also install lights on the very cabinets to get more coverage of the desired area, in which case you’d rely on under-cabinet lights as well as light strips.
Nowadays, you have all of these as LEDs so you’d get to save up on energy and have reliable lighting for hours and hours of use. They’re just as great when added over a kitchen island! Some people also like to use good old table lamps for this that they keep on the very counters. Others prefer to implement the beauty and usefulness of a few strategically scattered sconces that are ultra-stylish and the least intrusive in terms of wall space.
Accent
This type is exactly what you expect it to be – used for accent illumination. You can implement it in your home by choosing the charm of the versatile kitchen lights such as pendants that are available in all forms and designs. Whether you choose the one pendant as the main focal point or make up your own set of three matching models is up to you – what you can be certain of is décor success.
If you left the chandelier as a stunning lighting for the dining room, adding a set of pendants in the kitchen over the kitchen or bar island, sink or counters is a perfect idea. Keep in mind what makes pendants into these mighty choices is the fact they’re the mid options between ambient and task lights.
Other lights that are not that big as them, but can also serve as accents, are downlights and wall lights. Sconces are a great choice here as well because they’re ideal for providing light for specific spots or objects in the kitchen. As such, they draw the eyes to these areas so use these kitchen light fittings to your advantage in the lighting scheme.
Decorative
As the name implies, this type has to do with décor more than anything else. Think of these lights as accessories to your kitchen outfit design. If you want to add some bling to this room, these are your main tools as they’re created to draw attention with their overall looks. Anything that’s fancy, in an interesting and unique shape, or with plenty of opulence is ideal here, whether in the form of a chandelier, pendant, or wall-mounted models.
