Kitchen Lighting – from the Boss’s Kitchen

This week’s “Boss’s Kitchen” will focus on what kind of lighting we use in our kitchen.

Recessed cans around our kitchen perimeter.

Here is an overview of the lighting we used and why we used it. The goal, when deciding on how to light a kitchen, is to create the best task lighting you can without creating shadows. When I go into a lot of my customers’ kitchens, most people have a central dome light in the center of their kitchen. While this type of fixture throws a lot of light, it always creates shadows as the person working in the kitchen is always in front of it.

To remedy this problem in our kitchen, we used “layered lighting”. We start off the layers by strategically placing 5″ recessed can lights around the perimeter of the kitchen. The lights are installed so that they shine down on the front edge of the counter. This keeps them in front of the person cooking so they won’t create shadows.

LED under-cabinet light bar

The next layer is task lighting for the counter under the wall cabinets. For these lights, we opted for some LED under-cabinet light bars. These throw a ton of light and use almost no electricity.

Pendants and directional lights hanging from monorail

The final light layer for our kitchen was the lighting above the island. This is a great place to use different kinds of light. We have a couple pendant lights that hang from a “monorail” light track. When using pendants, it is an excellent opportunity to bring in some different colors to help tie the room together. The monorail provides a great source for electricity for our pendants as well as directional lighting. The directional lights we use shine on our hood (was a darkish area due to no recessed can) and fridge.

Next week will be our final post of this series and will focus on the appliances we selected for our kitchen as well as the sink and faucet. Thanks a lot for reading and as always hit us up on our facebook page or shoot us an email if you have any questions!

All the best,
Bill Hecht
President & CEO
David Hecht Custom Kitchens