Lighting Your Kitchen
The quality of light in your kitchen is very important. Not least because it’s very hard to cook in the dark. Mind you, whenever I make something for my children, they say it’s so bad I must have cooked it in the dark. [Sidenote—when I was a kid, my mum would only have to say “Or else...” when I refused to eat my greens, and I would gobble them up. These days, kids are too familiar with their universal human rights.]
Apart from affecting your ability to cook, the quality of light also determines how your kitchen looks. The wrong lighting can make it look abysmal. So it’s worthwhile spending a bit of time thinking about it.
Your first consideration is the source of light. Believe it or not, not all light is the same. You might look at a standard lightbulb and think it’s emitting white light. The same with fluorescent strip lighting. Or daylight—that’s ‘white’ too, isn’t it? Yes and, importantly, no. It might look white to you, but what’s happening is your brain is acting as a filter. It’s smoothing out your perception of the colour of the light so it looks white or neutral to you.
[Sidenote 2: I’m going to talk in broad brushstrokes here. I may skip a few nuances, so please don’t get upset if you have a PhD in colour science or lighting engineering. You can email corrections to me at: notarealemailaddress@leereeve.ie]
Not all light is white
Light from a regular lightbulb is often yellowish. Light from strip lighting is purple. Regular daylight is bluish. Modern LED bulbs can be trained at the factory to emit whatever colour light you want.
You can see what I’m talking about in this picture of a completely white kitchen I painted a couple of years ago:
The left of the frame is lit mostly by artificial light and has a very faint yellow tint. The right of the frame is lit mostly by the window light and is more blueish. [Sidenote 3: camera sensors can only compensate for one type of light or the other, which is why you see different colours here. If you were standing in this kitchen yourself, you would a) see the white as almost uniform across the board and b) be trespassing.]
[Sidenote 4: Sorry for all the sidenotes.]
But if the human brain can filter out the colour of the light so a scene looks ‘neutral’, why worry about how it is lit? Because the human brain isn’t perfect. (At least, my wife tells me mine isn’t.) Remember that dress on the internet a few years ago? Some people said it was white/gold but others swore was blue/black? You saw the dress either as one combination or the other depending on how your brain interpreted the light falling on it.
Is your kitchen paint Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde?
The same thing happens in your kitchen. Your brain does its best to interpret the colour of your kitchen cabinets based on the information it has. What that can mean is the colour of your kitchen might look very different during the day (when it is lit predominantly by daylight) than at night (when it is only lit by artificial light sources and your brain is guesstimating). By day, your kitchen island is burgundy; by night, it is perhaps brown. Suddenly, your kitchen is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. You might not like that.
To avoid this as much as possible, you could think about installing lighting in your kitchen that mimics daylight.
The other type of lighting to think about in your kitchen is highlight and accent lighting. Although that is really the domain of the kitchen designer. They will often create a kitchen that has recessed lights inside kitchen cabinets and under protruding surfaces. Sometimes, you even see small uplights too. Accent lighting can turn your kitchen into a subtle visual delight. Or into a spectacular fairground attraction. I’ve seen that happen too.
[Sidenote 5: It’s important to tell your kitchen painter about any small hidden lights in your kitchen cabinets if you don’t want them to vanish under a perfect paint finish.]
[Sidenote 6: I have never done this.]
[Sidenote 7: The End]