LIGHTING Guide
Rohan Blacker, Pooky Founder
When planning your kitchen, think about lighting from the start because retrospective planning can sometimes lead to compromise. If you want beautiful designer pendants or wall lights, as well as more functional LEDs built into recesses and cabinets, early planning will ensure the balance is right from the outset. Lighting choices can a ect other decisions: if you have a strong directed light over a workstation, you might want to choose a non-re ective material for the work surface to avoid glare.
In many homes, a kitchen isn’t just a place for cooking, it’s also a dining room, a family room, a place for entertaining and sometimes even an o ce. Give yourself plenty of options to create di erent atmospheres for these activities. Choose practical task lighting for cooking and working, and so er mood lighting with dimmers for entertaining. Use separate circuits for each type of lighting so you can control the overall atmosphere in the room. When positioning lights, watch out for shadows: although tempting to think that a pendant light over a work surface will solve the issue of task lighting, don’t forget that if you’re cooking directly below a low-hanging pendant, you may end up working in your own shadow.
Decorative pendants in the kitchen are a growing trend. People are ge ing more creative and mixing feature lights, colours and materials to create their own unique feature lighting. Our recently launched Quintet [below], for example, is a beautiful contemporary pendant, perfect for hovering over kitchen islands and also great for task lighting. It’s a distinctive take on feature lighting, and a move away from individual pendants.
In terms of minimising your impact on the environment, start by using LED bulbs. If you’re concerned about the sustainability of materials, then you could focus your a ention on ra a or jute products. However, these aren’t always the most suitable choices as they cannot be cleaned easily. Ceramic is relatively low impact, while also being wipeable, super-stylish and durable.
If you need more task lighting but are hoping to avoid hard wiring products in, you could always think about using a wall light that plugs into a normal socket and therefore avoids the need to chase cabling into the wall.
People are ge ing more creative – mixing feature lights, colours and materials...