How to Properly Light Your Kitchen
Ambient Lighting
Ambient or ‘background’ lighting is used to illuminate a whole room. It helps creates an overall mood, rather than serving one particular purpose. With a dimmer installed, you can have complete control over the level of brightness in your kitchen at any given time of the day. On a rainy day, you can increase the amount of light produced from your fixtures and on a summer night, you can lower the brightness to create a calm atmosphere. For kitchens with high ceilings, chandeliers work best as an ambient light source while adding style and functionality to a larger space. Light will spread throughout the entire room from an elegant fixture. The same style and functionality can be created in smaller kitchens with ceiling lights or wall mounts. At Connecticut Lighting Centers, we have a wide selection of Kichler™ flush mount lights and wall sconces that are available in a variety of styles, colors and sizes.
Task Lighting
This type of lighting brightens specific areas of the kitchen where certain tasks are performed. Whether you are washing dishes, preparing a meal or your children like to do their homework at the kitchen table, you need proper lighting to perform these tasks. Chopping vegetables might require more light than completing a homework assignment, so there are varying degrees of task lighting. A pendant above the kitchen island might shine just enough light for your son to see his book, but it’s just not bright enough when you’re cooking. Under cabinet lighting above your countertops can provide just the right illumination for preparing food, without casting shadows. These systems are not only unique and energy efficient with LED bulbs, but they create a safe environment when using a sharp knife to chop. Our Hartford and Southington showrooms stock Legrand™ under cabinet lighting that integrates with docking stations and outlets with USB ports.
Accent Lighting
The final type of lighting, accent, is mostly for aesthetic appeal. In your kitchen, there might be specific features that you want to highlight. If your cabinets are glass front, you can draw more attention to them by recess mounting Sea Gull™ puck lights above. If you have very detailed granite countertops, a simple table lamp can act as accent lighting by brightening the surface. This kind of lighting is more at the homeowner’s discretion than ambient and task, since you might not be interested in showing off any particular areas of your kitchen.
If you’ve recently noticed that your kitchen is either too bright or never bright enough, the solution could be as simple as a new lighting design scheme. The experienced technicians at Connecticut Lighting Centers can help you place the proper ambient, task and accent lighting fixtures around your kitchen so that every activity can be illuminated just right.