Room by Room
Kitchen pendant lights change how a kitchen feels more than any other single fixture, and the reason is that they're the only light in the room at eye height when you're standing at the counter. For the first five years in this cottage I cooked under a fluorescent panel installed sometime in the late 1990s, bright in the way only a fluorescent panel can be bright: complete, shadowless, slightly green. Food looked unappetizing in it. I looked unappetizing in it. Replacing it was the kitchen project I put off longest because the ceiling wiring seemed complicated, and it turned out to be a half-day job for an electrician and one of the best decisions we've made in this house. This post is what I chose and why, the two pendants over our modest island and the numbers behind their size, height and spacing, the glass and the bulb that give the warm-restaurant quality, the separate circuits that let the pendants do atmosphere while the strips do work, what a pendant costs to install, the mistakes I made with the first pair, and how to choose pendants for a kitchen that isn't ours.
A fluorescent panel lights everything equally from above, which means nothing is lit on purpose. There's no shadow under a bowl, no glow on a wooden board, no reason for the eye to go anywhere. It also runs at about 4100K with a CRI around 80, which is the combination that makes a tomato look grey and a face look tired. And it hums. The kitchen was a room I used and left, and I'm a person who cooks most nights. That's the case against overhead-only lighting in every room, and it's strongest in the kitchen, where you spend the most upright hours.
Clear glass globes, 8 inches across, on aged brass fittings and fabric-covered cords, two of them, over a 5-foot island, hung with the bottom of the glass 32 inches above the counter. Small enough not to dominate a modest island; clear enough that the filament-style 2700K bulb shows through and does the work of making the kitchen look like a place you'd want to eat in. Clear glass shows the bulb, so the bulb is the design: a spiral filament LED at 2700K, 450 lumens each, dimmable, and I've tried the frosted version and gone back, because frosted globes over a counter look like street lamps. The glass pendant post covers what we hung in every other room and why glass keeps winning in a small cottage with low ceilings.
Two pendants for an island up to 6 feet, three for 6 to 9 feet, and the diameter of each pendant in inches roughly the island's width in feet times 2; our 3-foot-wide island took 8-inch globes, and the 12-inch ones I nearly bought would have looked like two moons. Spacing: the island's length in inches divided by the number of pendants plus one, so a 60-inch island with two pendants puts them 20 inches from each end and 20 apart, though I moved ours 2 inches outward because the range hood pulled the eye. Height: the bottom of the shade 30 to 36 inches above the counter, and 32 is where a 5-foot-4 person can see across the island and a 6-foot person doesn't meet the glass. If the ceiling is under 8 feet, as ours is at 7 feet 10, that puts the shade at 68 inches from the floor, which is fine over an island nobody walks through and wrong over a walkway. Tape a paper circle to a string and hang it for a day before you commit; I did, and it's why the pendants are 2 inches further apart than the arithmetic said.
The pendants do atmosphere. The under-cabinet LED strips, 3000K, do the actual task lighting: chopping, reading recipes, checking the color of a sear. They're on separate circuits with separate dimmers, which cost about $40 more in switches and is the best $40 in the kitchen. Cooking: strips at full, pendants at 50 percent. Dinner at the island: strips off, pendants at 30 percent, and the kitchen turns into the sort of room a restaurant charges for. Cleaning up: everything at full, including the two recessed cans the electrician put in where the panel was, which are the only cool-ish light in the room and which are off 95 percent of the time. The bulb temperatures are different on purpose, 3000K for the strips because a green pepper should look green, 2700K in the pendants because a face should look like a face; the reasoning is in my bulb test.
Two pendants, $210 for the pair. Two filament bulbs, $18. Two dimmers, $52. The electrician, half a day: removed the fluorescent panel, patched and painted the 2 by 4 foot hole (which was most of the time), added two ceiling boxes over the island fed from the panel's circuit, and split the circuit so the pendants have their own switch; $480. The under-cabinet strips were an earlier project. About $760 for a kitchen that went from a room I left to a room I sit in, which is the best return per dollar of anything on this blog, and I've said that about several things, and I mean it about this one. The panel took eleven years to replace and forty minutes to remove, and I'd like that sentence to save someone a decade.
I bought black metal dome pendants first, 10 inches, because a magazine had them and because black felt safe. Hung, they blocked the view across the island, threw a hard circle of light on the counter and left the rest of the kitchen dark, and at 2700K the inside of a black dome makes the light look orange. They went back within a week, minus the $22 return shipping. The lesson is that an opaque shade in a small kitchen is a spotlight, and a small kitchen wants a glow. The second lesson is that "safe" black metal is the least safe choice over a white island, because it's the only dark object in the room and every eye goes to it. Brass and clear glass disappear into the light they make.
Start from the ceiling height and the island size, not from the style. Under 8 feet: small pendants, 6 to 9 inches, clear or thin opal glass, short drop. 8 to 9 feet: 8 to 12 inches, any shade that isn't opaque and dark. Over 9 feet: you can hang a real lantern. Then the finish: match the faucet and the cabinet pulls, or match one of them and let the other be the accent, and never introduce a third metal at the pendants. Then the bulb: filament LED, 2700K, dimmable, 400 to 500 lumens each, and clear glass shows it off. Then the count and spacing from the numbers above. Style comes last and is the least important decision on the list, which is not what the catalogs suggest. A plain clear globe on a brass cord has looked right in every kitchen I've seen it in, from a farmhouse to a white-box apartment, and ours will still look right in ten years, which the black domes would not have.
Clear glass shows the bulb and throws light in every direction, which is why it makes a small kitchen glow and why the bulb has to be a pretty one. Opal or frosted glass hides the bulb and softens the light into a lantern, which is right over a table and slightly municipal over a counter. Metal domes throw light straight down in a circle and leave the ceiling dark, which is right for task light over a workbench and wrong for a kitchen that's also a room. Linen drums do what a lampshade does, warm and diffused, and they're lovely over a table and collect grease over a stove. Rattan and woven shades throw a pattern on the ceiling and are the cottage answer to a dining nook, and ours is over the table, not the island, for the grease reason. In a small kitchen the shade that hides the least is usually the right one, because the pendant's job is to make light, not to be looked at.
A plug-in pendant on a swag hook does 80 percent of this for $70 and no wiring: the cord runs along the ceiling to a wall and down to an outlet in a paintable cover, the hook goes in a joist, the pendant hangs at the same 32 inches, and the switch is a plug-in dimmer at the outlet. I did this in our son's first apartment over a table and it looked like it had always been there. The fluorescent panel stays, switched off, or gets a warm bulb and a diffuser and stays off anyway. What you lose is the second circuit; the strips under the cabinets can be plug-in too, and a smart plug per zone gives you the same two switches. What you keep is the whole effect, which is the light at eye height over the place you stand.
Over a dining table, one larger pendant, 16 to 20 inches, at 30 to 34 inches above the tabletop, or two small ones over a long table; the dining nook in our kitchen has one 14-inch linen drum on a dimmer, which is a different mood from the island's glass and is meant to be. Over a sink with a window, a single small pendant at 66 inches from the floor, off-center toward the window so it doesn't fight the daylight. Over a peninsula that's open to a walkway, the pendants go higher, 36 inches above the counter and 76 from the floor, or somebody meets one. In every case, the pendant is the atmosphere and something else does the task, and the two are on different switches, which is the sentence I'd put on the box if I sold pendants.
The pendants are one of four layers. The strips under the cabinets are the second. The two recessed cans where the panel was are the third, and they're the emergency light. The fourth is a small wall sconce beside the window over the sink, on the pendant circuit, which lights the one corner the pendants can't reach and which is on every evening from October to March when the window is dark by five. Four sources, two switches, and the room reads as lit from the counters up rather than from the ceiling down, which is the difference between a kitchen and a canteen, and the whole of what the overhead-light post is about.
The glass gets wiped monthly with a damp cloth, and the brass has darkened into something nicer than it was in the box. The filament bulbs have been replaced once, both at the same time from the same box, so they match. The dimmer has been touched every single evening for six years, which is how I know the pendants weren't a decoration. I cook more than I did. We eat at the island more than at the table. And the fluorescent panel is in the garage, still, because my husband thinks it might be useful for something, and it's the only thing in the garage I'd happily see go, though I've stopped saying so out loud.
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