3 Lighting Ideas for Small Kitchens

Lighting is vital to create the right vibe in any room. When it comes to lighting ideas for small kitchens, as well as creating the right vibe, you also need enough light to see what you’re doing so you don’t accidentally add salt instead of sugar to your banana muffins.

While you may covet those humongous hanging pendant lights interior design websites love to tempt us with, they’re just not practical for lighting a small kitchen.

You don’t have to cook in the dark though – there are plenty of options for lighting a small kitchen and a few of them are below.

You might also want to read this great post on low ceiling kitchen lighting ideas.

Strip lights or recessed lights under kitchen cabinets

When you go shopping for lighting, under-cabinet lighting isn’t usually something you lust over. ‘Look at that sexy strip light,’ said no one ever. Let’s face it, you’re far more likely to ooh and aah over the pretty pendant lights hanging above your head.

However, LED strip lighting or spotlights under your kitchen cabinets are perfect for adding more light to a small kitchen. This is especially true if you have glossy work surfaces such as quartz kitchen worktops, which will reflect the light back.

Recessed ceiling lights

There’s absolutely no danger of you hitting your head on recessed ceiling lights (also called spotlights or downlights) as these types of lights are flush with the ceiling.

Because these lights are built into the ceiling, they’re perfect for small kitchens, especially if your ceilings are low.

The downside to downlights is that they don’t give off a huge amount of light, so if you like the idea of these, it’d also be worth considering getting some lights for under your kitchen cabinets as mentioned above.

Multi-directional ceiling lights

Multi-directional ceiling lights are a great option for lighting a small kitchen as they’re quite close to the ceiling and therefore don’t take up as much room as a pendant light, which hangs down low.

As the name suggests, these types of lights are multi-directional, so you can point them in different directions depending on where you need a light source the most (when you’re frying something on the hob and need to see what you’re doing so you don’t burn yourself, for example).

As you can see from the above, there are plenty of lighting ideas for small kitchens.

You may not be able to have the lighting of your dreams until you win the lottery and can move somewhere with a huge kitchen but, until that lottery win comes through, there’s no need to cook in the dark.