Make Your Kitchen Glaring at You

Light has been on my mind a lot lately.

Probably, though, it’s because whenever I’m in my kitchen, I am pinned beneath the clinical glare of a monstrous 45-by-16-inch fluorescent light fixture situated over my island. Just a few feet away, a second one (22 by 22 inches) stares down from above the sink. The effect is far from soothing, and in fact rather unsettling, as though my kitchen were a morgue and my island an autopsy table.

The good news, as I contemplate a kitchen overhaul in the (hopefully) near future, is that lighting in kitchens has changed a lot since the previous owner of my home remodeled the space some 15 years ago.

Kitchen designer Mary Galloway of Onesta Design in Alexandria agrees, saying she views the kitchen as a place of many scenes set, in large part, by how it is lit. “You think about someone cooking, someone eating, someone snacking at midnight,” Galloway says. ” . . . Your lighting needs change depending on the scene.”

Recessed lighting, which provides the general lighting in many kitchens these days, has come a long way, says designer Jennifer Gilmer of Jennifer Gilmer Kitchen & Bath in Chevy Chase. Most types now use smaller cans than the once-standard six-inch size, and incandescent bulbs have been replaced by more efficient lights.

Indeed, just as we’ve seen the proliferation of tiny, bright LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs on trees and roofs during the holidays, so are these energy-efficient lights making their way into the kitchen, not only in recessed lighting but also in task and accent lights.

More and more kitchens are also adding accent lights — those that draw attention to a particular appliance or decorative piece, the inside of a cabinet, or the so-called toe-kick space just above the floor — though the latter seems to have its detractors. “I would say that 50 percent of our customers love the toe-space lighting, while the other 50 percent see no point in it,” says Anderson. Its primary function (and appeal) is that it can softly light the kitchen at night, he says.

Pendant lights continue to be popular. They are “a good way to add color and some bling,” Anderson says. Gilmer says the sheer variety in styles makes pendant lighting a good option for almost any kitchen. In fact, it was a pendant light that helped solve a puzzle for one of Gilmer’s clients. “This particular person has contemporary tastes, but we needed something that would fit in with the traditional look of their Georgetown brownstone.” In the end she chose a pair of spare, vessel-shaped frosted glass and chrome pendants to hang above the sink and adjacent cream, black and gray mottled granite countertop.

The Kast LED Task Light

The beautiful, sleek, yet simple design of the Kast light is complemented by its quarter-shaped array of two five-watt LED clusters which are precisely angled to deliver glare-free light projection.

Kast has been manufactured with sustainability in mind, using over 80 percent recyclable aluminum and steel, composed of 40 percent recycled material with 27 percent post-consumer recycled content, and 100 percent solvent free powder coat finishes. The LED light helps make the task light affordable to the user, offering an average rated life of 100,000 hours which is ten times greater than most compact fluorescent lamps. In addition, the LED diodes are nearly 25 percent more energy-efficient than comparable compact fluorescent technology.

This is the first year for the Green GOOD DESIGN Award. It is a specialized edition of the GOOD DESIGN Award program which was founded in 1950 by architects Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The GOOD DESIGN Awards bestow international recognition on designers and manufacturers for advancing innovation and originality. The awards are presented by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The purpose of the Green GOOD DESIGN Award is to emphasize the importance of sustainable design and to develop a public awareness program to the international general public educating about which companies are doing the greatest job creating sustainable design for our world environments. The Green GOOD DESIGN Award received hundreds of submissions from over 40 nations. Only 105 products, programs, people, government, environmental planning, and architecture were selected as outstanding examples of Green Design.

The Kast(TM) LED task light by Details, a Steelcase company, recently received a 2009 Green GOOD DESIGN(TM) Corporate Award. This award sets the bar for outstanding examples of Green Design. The beautiful, sleek, yet simple design of the Kast light is complemented by its quarter-shaped array of two five-watt LED clusters which are precisely angled to deliver glare-free light projection.