Stylish Lighting Ideas for Your New Kitchen

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When renovating your kitchen, you may focus on aspects such as flooring, cabinets and countertops. Improving on these aspects is important, but have you considered how your lighting currently is? Standard kitchen lighting is rarely good enough to elevate the comfort and appeal of your kitchen. In fact, a single ceiling light may result in dark spots within the kitchen. You should consider giving your kitchen lights a complete overhaul during the renovation process. This means installing new fixtures, using modern bulbs and rewiring the space to make it more energy efficient. If you're not familiar with modern types of lighting, here are a few tips to help you choose the best fit for your kitchen.

1. Ambient lighting

Ambient lighting is the easiest way of giving your current lighting fixtures a breath of fresh air. By definition, ambient lighting is any type of light that diffuses evenly across an environment. It may consist of a ceiling light, uplighting, or wall lights. As long as light rays travel randomly across the entire room, you can consider that type of lighting as ambient.

Unfortunately, many kitchens simply use a single ceiling light as the ambient source. This makes the space appear dull and uninviting. You can spice up ambient lighting by adding a chandelier to the fixture. Chandeliers are elegant, attractive, and customizable. You may also consider using multiple sources of ambient lighting. Instead of relying on a ceiling bulb, have an electrician install multiple wall fixtures to make your kitchen more in tune with current trends.      

2. Accent lighting

All your kitchen lights don't have to be in one place. While ambient lighting can be the main option, you should also consider giving your floors some more visibility. Floors tend to be in shadow when there's only a single source of light. However, accent lighting can breathe life into your elegant stone or tile floors. Consider placing some accent lights underneath cabinets to give them a floating effect. Accent lights may be as simple as an LED strip light or as complex as engraved lighting inside your walls.  

You can also install uplights behind large appliances such as refrigerators and ovens. In this way, you'll have a balanced effect across the entire kitchen. Uplighting also gets rid of hidden corners where pests might hide.

3. Dimmer switches

How you control your lights can also affect the ambience of your kitchen. Dimmer switches are simple, yet convenient ways of controlling brightness, colour intensity and timing settings. Consider installing dimmer switches to control your bulbs and kitchen lights.

For more advice on kitchen renovations, contact a company like Brindabella Kitchens.

27 September 2019