When designing our kitchens, our minds immediately go to the “big things.” These include what kinds of kitchen appliances we will buy – the make, the size, and colour of the refrigerator and cooker, for example. Where will we fit them in? And what about more auxiliary appliances, such as the washing machine and dryer, which don’t necessarily have to be in the kitchen but often are? Then, there are the countertops – what colour will they be? Will they be marble, formica, or wood? And how many kitchen cabinets do we need? What size and where will they go?
But the one thing that we often forget when designing a kitchen and can be just as important as any of the items mentioned above is kitchen lighting. The way that we light the kitchen can affect the ambiance and feel of the room. Yet we often forget this important point, and many kitchens are just fitted with a plain strip light to make them as bright as possible.
In fact, in many households the kitchen is the nerve centre of the home. It is the place where we prepare food, and depending on its size it is where we eat, hang out, and for some of us it is the place where we spend most of the day. Therefore, the brightness of the light is not the main issue. We want the room to be homely, welcoming, and comfortable. On a cold winter’s day, we think of a warm kitchen as the place to come for a bowl of hot soup to relieve the chill. In many families, it is also the place where we can be ourselves; more formal meals are served in the dining room, but more private “family” time is spent in the kitchen.
For this reason, you really need two types of kitchen lights. On the one hand, they need to be soft and comfortable for those intimate, “hanging out in the kitchen” moments. But on the other hand, it is also important to have sufficient light to see what you are doing. You need to see very clearly whether the food is cooking properly, if there are bugs in the lettuce, and whether the food in the container you just took out of the fridge really does look like that.
