The kitchen is becoming the heart of every house – there is no longer any stigma involved in calling your friends over to the kitchen and relaxing by grabbing beers and spending time preparing a meal. One of the most common reasons people don’t use their kitchen more is lighting – bad lighting will give your kitchen a dead ambience and make it uninhabitable. Here are tips to fix that:
Sufficient Lighting
This is the most important aspect of the design – whatever you do, make sure your kitchen gets enough lighting. Many people get lost in the minutiae of whether they should choose a daylight LED strip or recessed LED strip lighting, and they don’t remember to actually properly light their whole kitchen. So, even if you need kitchen cupboard lights or a led under-cabinet lighting to light up the whole place, use them! A kitchen with proper lighting will have a warm and welcoming atmosphere, so much so that you and your family will want to spend more time there.
Colour Psychology
The last 20 years of scientific literature shows that colour schemes affect humans much more than we thought. They can determine our mood and our emotions, which means we should pay extra attention to what colours of lighting we choose. Two basic examples of how colour distorts our perception:
- Black: this colour is one of the most popular colours used in new kitchens. It gives an aura of sophistication and makes your kitchen look more expensive and chic than it really is. The major drawback of black is its effect on our mood – spending too much room in a dark room will increase your chances of being depressed.
- Blue: a warm and welcoming colour, which is why it is usually used in bedrooms. A blue hue can give your kitchen a relaxing quality and make guests feel more welcoming.
This is just an example of what colour psychology has found about each colour – doing more research and deciding which effect you want your kitchen to have is the key to deciding which colour your kitchen should be.
Cost
Cost is a hard thing to get right: you want to spend enough to buy quality lights and adorn your kitchen enough to make sure it looks nice and modern, but you don’t want to spend so much it’ll affect your budgeting for the next year. While proper lighting is important for your kitchen, it is not more important than actually getting food on the table. You should tread carefully and make sure you balance everything out before you go through with your plan.