Kitchen Spotlights

Aim at the worktop, not the room

The commonest kitchen lighting mistake is a single central fitting: stand at the counter and you work in your own shadow. Spotlights solve that because each head aims independently. Point them at the front edge of the worktop rather than straight down, and the light falls where your hands are.

The same logic applies to a sink and a hob. Both are places you stand and look down, and both are usually against a wall, so a head aimed from slightly in front of you rather than directly overhead keeps your own shadow off the work. An extractor hood with its own light covers the hob; the sink almost never has anything and is worth a dedicated head.

Bars against single heads

A bar of three or four heads replaces a central fitting on one ceiling point and needs no new wiring, which makes it the usual choice in a retrofit. Single heads suit a spot over a sink or a run of them on a track. Sizes here run from 18.7cm for a single up to 65cm for the longer bars.

GU10 and what it means for running costs

Most of these take a GU10 lamp, which is the standard replaceable twist-and-lock spot. It matters because a fitting with an integral LED is scrap when the LED fails, while a GU10 fitting takes a new lamp in ten seconds. A few here use GX53, which is a flatter lamp for shallow fittings.

Beam angle and spacing

A narrow beam of around 24 degrees makes a pool of light and suits a spot aimed at one point. A wider 36 to 60 degree beam covers more and is the safer choice where the heads are spaced along a bar. As a starting point, space heads about a metre apart along a worktop run.

Output is the other half of the calculation. A kitchen wants around 300 lumens per square metre over the worktop, which is roughly double what a living room needs. Four heads at 400 lumens each cover a small kitchen; a larger room or a darker scheme needs either more heads or brighter lamps, and it is cheaper to plan for that than to add a fitting later.

Finish and how it reads against a kitchen

Sand white and matt white disappear into a white ceiling, which is usually what you want when the fitting is doing a job rather than being looked at. Sand black and matt black read as deliberate against a pale ceiling and suit a kitchen with dark handles or black tap ware.

Colour temperature in a kitchen

A kitchen is the one room where cooler light earns its place. 3000K stays warm and flatters a wood or cream kitchen. 4000K is crisper, shows the true colour of food and suits a white or grey scheme. Mixing the two along one run is the thing to avoid.

Dimming is worth designing in even here. A kitchen is a workroom at six and a room people sit in at nine, and the same heads at thirty per cent are a different room. Fit dimmable GU10 lamps and a trailing edge dimmer rated for the total load, and check the minimum load: a dimmer rated from 25W will not run three 5W lamps smoothly.