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Rotating Kitchen Island
Rylight_Shop
The Right Way to Light a Kitchen
All illustrations: Doug Walter For too many years, the advice about kitchen lighting given by people who should know better has been to place the can lights out in the aisles of the kitchen. This looks nice on the plans, but it keeps the people working in the kitchen in the dark. I prefer to locate can lights closer to the upper cabinets, where they deliver three or four times as many foot-candles to the work surface. That’s not a guess—I’ve measured it both ways.
Kitchen Lighting Design
The illustration on the left shows the all-too-frequent poor placement of stand-alone ambient downlighting in a kitchen. In this scenario, the person working at the counter casts a shadow over the work area. On the right, downlights placed much closer to the wall light up the work area and are supplemented with under-cabinet lights to provide effective task lighting.
