Kitchen Recessed Lighting Design: Illuminate Your Cooking Area in Your Encinitas Home
In 2021 we used around 59 billion kWh of electricity to light our homes. That’s 4% of our total electricity use, but great lighting design is about so much more than just flooding your home with rays.
To set the right tone and deliver the perfect ambiance, kitchen lighting needs careful thought. Your kitchen recessed lighting design should be both functional and stylish at the same time. It’s one of the few forms of lighting that not only makes your kitchen safer, but also adds the wow factor to your Encinitas home.
Let’s take a deep dive into kitchen recessed lighting tips that’ll take the heart of your home to the next level.
What is Kitchen Recessed Lighting?
Recessed lighting goes by a few different names – can lighting and pot lighting are just two. The lighting fixtures are recessed into the ceiling. Cutouts are made and the fixture is hidden out of sight.
They’re a great way of creating a minimalist look that focuses your attention on the main attractions of the kitchen. If they’re spaced correctly they can provide excellent task lighting.
Positioning Kitchen Recessed Lighting
Getting the positioning of kitchen recessed lighting is incredibly important, because where there’s light, there’s shadow.
If you position your recessed lights too close to the fronts of the upper cabinets you’ll end up with deep shadows on your counters. This will make it super difficult to prepare food and you’ll have to install under cabinet lighting.
Side note – under cabinet lighting is great, and you should think about adding it as a feature.
To ensure that light shines on your counters where you need it, position the recessed lights three feet from the walls. Standard upper cabinets range from 12″ to 24″ in depth. You may need to increase the clearance for deeper cabinets to allow the light to reach the back of the counter.
Any kitchen lighting guide or expert in the Encinitas area will tell you that recessed lights need to be positioned at an equal distance from each other. This gives the room a balanced look and ensures an even distribution of light.
Combining Kitchen Lighting Styles
We often use recessed lighting to provide the overall ambient light in our kitchen. They’re perfect for narrow galley kitchens where you can’t have overhead lighting without banging your head.
Recessed lights are so unobtrusive that you can still use accent or feature lights. They don’t vie for attention. They’ll just be there quietly in the background, bathing the room in light.
This allows you to pick out key areas with pendant lights, for example, over an island or dining area. A combination of soft recessed lighting and under cabinet lights is the perfect combination for cooking in the evening. You can clearly see what you’re doing and work safely but without the harsh glare of downlighters at full brightness.
Choose Dimmable Options
One of the best kitchen lighting tips we can give you is to invest in dimmable lights.
If you don’t, you may find that the light produced is overpowering, particularly at night. Having dimmable lights allows you to soften the light. It also allows feature lighting to shine while not leaving the rest of the kitchen in darkness.
Dimmable lights are perfect when you need enough light to see what you’re doing but want to create an ambiance. This is especially important in kitchens that have a dining area or nook.
To achieve this look, consider dividing your recessed lighting into zones. You’ll still have enough light to cook safely while being able to dim the lighting area to create the right mood. No one wants to sit down to an elegant dinner party at your Encinitas home with overhead lights glaring down on them!
Types of Recessed Lighting
You can use recessed lighting to provide concentrated beams or pools of light, or you can use them to provide a wide beam of general lighting.
Wider beams mean fewer shadows – ideal in the kitchen as you need general light to see what you are doing. More narrow beams will tend to leave dark spots if you don’t position them correctly. However, you can use them effectively to provide directional light over the stove, sink, and food preparation areas.
Which Bulbs are the Best?
In the past, all kinds of bulbs were used in recessed lighting, including incandescent and halogen. Now, the best kind is LED. LEDs are energy-efficient and come in a huge range of styles.
You can get white light and warm light, as they are designed to fit perfectly into downlighters. By sitting flush with the ceiling they are unobtrusive, but still provide excellent lighting coverage. They run at a much lower temperature than incandescent bulbs, meaning that they last longer and use less energy.
IC-Rated or Non-IC?
When shopping for recessed lighting you’ll notice there are two types of housings – IC and non-IC rated.
IC-rated lights are designed for insulated ceilings. They can be safely installed next to insulation. If you don’t have insulation in your kitchen ceiling you can use non-IC-rated housing.
Choose Lighting Distinctions for Kitchen Recessed Lighting Near Encintas
We hope this kitchen recessed lighting guide has given you lots of ideas about how to use lighting to bring your kitchen to life. Kitchen lighting is both a science and an art, and using layers of lighting from different sources is the key to achieving a stunning effect.
At Lighting Distinctions we’re your local Encinitas area LED lighting experts. We have created hundreds of bespoke lighting solutions, combining kitchen recessed lighting and other styles to create something truly special.
If you’d like us to do the same for your home, why not schedule a complimentary consultation today?