How Best to Light Your Kitchen with Lighting Designer Clare Pendarves
How Best to Light Your Kitchen with Lighting Designer Clare Pendarves
Getting the lighting just right in your kitchen can be a hurdle. And finding that balance between a dingy, low lit space and an overly bright and glaring kitchen is not always easy. So today we have with us lighting designer and expert Clare Pendarves to help us out with her inside advice.
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Question: What is your opinion on Kitchen lighting? What is your professional input on how best to light a kitchen? We know it can be very different depending on your kitchen but if you can give us your rules of thumb that you always stick by?
Claire: Well they are very different and nowadays you’ll find that kitchens are part of the main living area as well, so it is very important to have zoning. If you’ve got your kitchen and then it goes through into the dining area and then there’s a seating area you’ve got to have a good number of circuits there.
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So I would say in an open plan area like that you really seriously have to think of some home automaton system, because otherwise you’re going to have too many switches.
And I know a lot of people will say, a lot of clients will say, not so many nowadays actually, will say "oh but it’s so complicated" and I say "no, it’s not complicated".
You don’t have to think about that. It’s the technician who thinks about it, you just have to come on. You’ve got three or four switches and you can have your moods and you can zone.
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That can often be under some wall units if you’ve got those. So that when you’re entertaining people aren’t seeing all the mess that always piles up on that island or whatever so you’ve got little separate one that is just low lighting there.
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So focus on the working areas and then have the ambient areas that you would want maybe on when you’re in the other part of the open plan area.
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You want to really feel really alive and awake and so you want to up that light, so you need to do that. And then you need to do that for cleaning and things like that, but you don’t necessarily need it on all the time.
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Question: And how do you prevent glare with lighting?
Claire: well I will see some designs where they’ve literally got the light directly over the person whose working and the work surface. You don’t want that, you want it directed onto the work surface.
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Thank you so much Clare for clearing up all our questions on how best to light up our kitchens. Now they’ll be spaces that can be enjoyed without the worry of over straining eyes in a gloomy kitchen or squinting past the glare of a thousand downlights. As the hub of the home, the importance of a well-lit kitchen cannot be overlooked. Now time to get cooking on these light bites!
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The importance of light zoning for open plan kitchens
![](https://www.soholighting.com/sohowp/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screenshot-2019-10-17-at-12.13.18.png)
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Lighting up your Kitchen Counter
![](https://www.soholighting.com/sohowp/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screenshot-2019-10-17-at-12.12.12-600x425.png)
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Where to hold back on lighting?
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Brighten up those Gloomy Days
![](https://www.soholighting.com/sohowp/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screenshot-2019-10-17-at-12.12.48-600x396.png)
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Avoid Glare with Dimmers
![](https://www.soholighting.com/sohowp/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screenshot-2019-10-17-at-12.12.58-600x397.png)
![](https://www.soholighting.com/sohowp/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Should-I-have-a-real-marble-worktop-in-my-kitchen-A-blog-comparing-pros-and-cons-of-marble-and-quartz-worktops_-The-deVOL-Journal-400x600.jpg)