The kitchen is the heart of the home, but how do you create a welcoming feeling with lighting?
In the video below, Lee Travis with Wipliance and David Warfel from Light Can Help You explore what makes kitchen lighting unique and how to create lighting for a variety of needs. Most electrical plans only cover ceiling lights for safety, possibly some questionably placed under cabinet lighting. A well-designed kitchen lighting layout will have many layers to accentuate surfaces and provide sufficient lighting for tasks. Most importantly, those fixtures are placed in a way that can transform your kitchen from day to night. Adding recessed fixtures that direct light onto nearby doorways and cabinets highlights the unique wood tones, expands the space and creates a sense of a sky.
Pendants, while great for decoration- typically don’t provide a great task light source and could cause an uncomfortable glare at full brightness. Partnering the pendants with directional task lighting for the work surfaces creates a space perfect for cooking and creating. There are so many ways to light shelves—and what kind of fixtures and how you place them on the shelves can magically transform what your eye focuses on, and beautiful drama can be created with strategic placement and fixture selection. Linear lighting used as under cabinet lighting and even toe kick lighting provides a sense of boundary which can be helpful for stability in homes with older residents or poor vision. Highlighting nooks such as under your bar counter can chase out dark corners and create a more welcoming environment. Unique fixtures such as artificial skylights take natural light even further with optical illusions that allow the light to appear as though it is tracking with you- but easy to turn on and off from a switch.
Ready to unwind? A well-designed kitchen lighting design will incorporate tunable lighting solutions so that the color and brightness of the light can be adjusted to go from a productive afternoon to a relaxing evening.
Need help with creating the perfect lighting for your kitchen? The installation experts at Wipliance (also a 2022 Best of Our Valley winner!) and the design team at Light Can Help You can work with you to find the perfect solution for your home.
Learn more at wipliance.com.
