The biggest kitchen lighting mistakes to avoid

Kitchen lighting can be mood enhancing; or alternatively can aid in creating a completely unappealing environment if you don’t get it right. It’s about striking a balance between practicality and style—to ensure your kitchen feels inviting and warm rather than sterile and desolate.

As we know, the kitchen is the heart of the home—a high traffic area that is used for cooking, entertaining, homework and personal admin. You want to ensure your lighting design is non-intrusive in the space; meaning your lighting fixtures and placement won’t continuously annoy you due to thoughtless placement and lack of planning. Generally, a mistake of this calibre is only discovered upon the completion of the project. This can be a costly mistake that you want to avoid after completing a kitchen renovation on a budget you have saved or planned extensively for.

Lighting placement and design strategy.

When renovating your kitchen, your list of inclusions can seem endless at the beginning. It’s vital you stay aware in order to not miss any important elements during your planning phase, especially when it comes to your lighting design strategy. In order to successfully incorporate impressive lighting design into your kitchen renovation—your lighting placement cannot be an afterthought. It must be included in your original plan and budgeted for accordingly. Your electrician or renovation design company should be consulted and briefed accordingly to ensure the correct placement of cabling, outlets and lighting fixtures etc. Installing a lighting design plan once the kitchen is complete often requires paid for work being undone in order to achieve your vision. BJF Joinery, has a team of specialists who understand the importance and complexity of smart lighting designs and are equipped to incorporate all your lighting needs in one seamless design strategy for your upcoming kitchen renovation plan.

Lighting colour choice.

There are two common colour choices in most light sources utilised in a domestic kitchen renovation; the first being white or ‘daytime’ which stimulates our ‘daytime’ body rhythms and is better at keeping you aware and attentive. White lighting is the ideal task lighting which means it provides increased light in a room which may already have ambient lighting designed to help people complete specific tasks more effectively. White light is ideal for homework, sewing, gift wrapping, completing taxes, preparing meals etc. Yellow lighting can be more relaxing and ambient as it stimulates our ‘nighttime’ body rhythms. The yellower the light the more calming the environment will be. Yellow light is the perfect mood lighting as it aids in creating the ultimate calm and tranquil space. Remember that the brightness is in ‘lumens’ and the colour temperature in ‘Kelvins’. It is the latter that is the measure of the “yellowness” or “whiteness” of the light. If the colour temperature seems right but you feel the kitchen is over lit, there is the option to add an LED-compatible dimmer to create balance in the space.

Choosing the right lighting for an open plan kitchen design.

When it comes to planning lighting for an open plan kitchen renovation—it’s vital to factor in the surrounding rooms in order to effectively plan the lighting strategy for your new kitchen. For example, if you have a lounge/TV room adjacent to the kitchen and you choose to only incorporate high brightness white task lighting, this can be exceptionally jarring to the eye when wanting to enjoy downtime or watch a movie in the main lounge room. This leaves you with your only option being to turn the kitchen lighting off completely for the duration of this time. This can be impractical and a simple solution to this problem is to incorporate dimmable or ambient style lighting in conjunction with the harsher task lighting so the kitchen lighting can be softened and increased in line with your lifestyle. This ‘layered’ approach to lighting allows you to control the mood, ambience, functionality and style of your home simply and effectively if installed right.