Kitchen & Bath Lighting Basics  

By Stan O. Humphries, P.E.

Here is a second article on basic lighting design.  My first article discussed the basics of residential lighting.  Those basics were a discussion of ambient, accent and decorative lighting. These terms mean just what they say.  Ambient lighting is the light that surrounds you, like from your kitchen fluorescent or downlights, it fills the room with light.  Accent lighting is your track fixtures or directional fixtures that  might accent a piece of artwork or a table centerpiece.  The decorative lights would include your pendant centered over your dining room, the sconces in your hallway etc. Good lighting will typically use all three basic types of lighting in a room.  That first article went on to apply those basics to lighting a great room, living room or den in your house.  This time we will apply those basics to the kitchen.

To start with we should recognize the kitchen and bathroom are workrooms where we perform a specific task. The lighting for these areas are demanding because we want to have good light levels where we need it.   No one readily wants to cut onions with a sharp knife on a dark counter top, or a counter top with a mirage of shadows. Similar for a bathroom, shaving with a sharp razor you want to see your self plainly in a mirror with out the distraction of the glare from a mirror light that is too bright.

So let’s take the kitchen first.  We approach the lighting design for a kitchen like we would any room.  A term I introduced last time was “layering”.  Which means simply applying all three basic types of lighting, ambient, accent, decorative.  For a kitchen we want the room filled with ambient light, but we will need some specific task lighting or accent lighting at the counter tops and possibly some decorative lighting to add that final touch.

Let’s take those one at a time.  First the kitchen ambient lighting.  For most houses in America, we have a fluorescent in the center of the kitchen providing the ambient lighting and sometimes the only lighting for the kitchen.  Functionally the fluorescent light does beautifully because it provides a lot of diffused light.  A lot of people disapprove of fluorescent lighting because it’s not as attractive lighting source as an incandescent.  They have improved the fluorescent lamp tremendously so that it is a very good light, but for the best lighting, incandescent is still the preferred light.

Why incandescent?  I’m afraid that’s a long discussion by itself and good material for a future article.  For now I’ll try to keep it short.  Incandescent light is the typical lamp you buy for your table lamp.  It comes in hundreds of forms; the “A” lamp is what you put in your table lamp, the “PAR” lamp in your track light or accent light.  What is attractive about incandescents is that it best reproduces the light we see from the sun.  We see this inside by the colors that the incandescents bring out in natural finishes like wood, stone, tile, etc.  Fluorescents shouldn’t be ruled out completely.  They have come a long way in making the fluorescent almost as good as the incandescent in terms of light quality.  The biggest feature of the fluorescents are that they are much more energy efficient and have a lot longer lamp life.

So in a kitchen incandescents are attractive because it not only brings out the natural beauty of your wood cabinets, granite counter tops and tile floors, but it also brings out the natural colors of the food you are preparing.  Back to the ambient lighting since we’ve decided to use incandescent.  The typical choice we have for incandescent lighting is downlights.  Downlights have to be used carefully.  They do just what they say, they push light down, and usually down to the floor.  We can't use that light at the floor, so we look at other opportunities for ambient lighting to supplement those downlights.  One idea that is usually attractive is using strip incandescent lighting “clik strips” on top of the cabinets to bounce light off of the ceiling.  Another idea would be to use some decorative lights as the ambient lighting source.  A set of three or five colored incandescent pendants over center counter top is attractive.  There are several incandescent ceiling surface mounted decorative fixtures that can be placed in with the downlights at the ceiling.  Even accent lighting can be used to supplement the ambient lighting in the kitchen.  You can use a row of accent lights along your wood cabinets to bounce light off of your wood cabinets.  The important point here is not to use just one source of ambient lighting, like the downlights.  Add several ambient sources so that the room is comfortable with lots of lighting without any of the lighting being too bright and distracting.

After we have a good source of ambient lighting, consider using the accent lighting or task lighting to put light where we need it: the counter tops.  Usually, an incandescent or fluorescent strip light located under your cabinets does the best job.  This puts light right where you need it and out of sight.  If it is a continuous light strip, it eliminates any multiple shadowing that can be very distracting.

More accent lighting can be used to highlight some of the outstanding characteristics of your kitchen.  Stovetop hoods can become elaborate affairs of copper, gun metal or wood.  So those become center pieces to the kitchen, use a set of accent lights to highlight that center piece.  A granite island counter top might be highlighted with a set of recessed downlights with a heavily shielded “pinspot” or “slot” diffuser.  Accent lights can be used effectively to highlight most anything in the kitchen, pot racks, wood cabinets, dish displays and more.

Decorative lighting in the kitchen is used selectively.  Pendants tend to get in the way; ceiling fixtures tend to attract the grease from your breakfast bacon, etc.  Usually, I’ll avoid the decorative lights in the kitchen, unless there is a good opportunity.  Good opportunities would include just filling a space, or small pendants over the breakfast bar, etc.  The best decoration in the kitchen is usually the finishes.  So I’ll usually highlight those finishes instead of adding decorative lights to try to compete with those finishes.

If you have any feed back regarding this article don’t hesitate to call or email.  And as always if you want a copy of any of my past articles, please call.  And let me know if you have any lighting subjects that you’d like to see written about.

Stan Humphries is a lighting professional who is the president of the mechanical and electrical design firm, Architectural Engineering Consultants.  You can contact him at work, 970-748-8520, or via email at stan@aec-vail.com.