Designing Your Recessed Lighting

Posted on February 18, 2019

Recessed lighting, also known as can lighting, is a form of light fixture that is placed in holes gouged into your ceiling. It is a popular choice among people wanting to redesign the lighting in their home to become more modern and out of the way.

With this form of lighting fixture, you are able to free up clutter from other lighting fixtures such as lamps or hanging lights. This type of fixture is ideal for rooms that are used for reading or working, most people also often use this form of lighting to highlight wall fixtures. But before you go ahead and get your lighting installed, you need to do some research and designing of your own!

Lighting layers

When installing recessed lighting, you need to do a little research on the three lighting layers. These layers are general lighting, accent lighting, and task lighting. Each layer of lighting is meant to serve a different purpose, as you can tell just from the name of each type. The three types all work with recessed lighting; whether it just be task lighting for your kitchen or accent lighting for a room that has hanging art and other pieces.

Hidden in the ceiling

The best thing about recessed lighting is very important in relation to how you design the lighting fixture itself. This great feature of recessed lighting is that it can stay hidden away from the world to the point that it completely blends in with your ceiling. This can be done a various amount of ways: focus on trim color, correct spacing, causation of a glare, and the amount of lights already in the room.

Focal point

After you know a little bit about how your recessed lighting should look and feel, start designing how you want them! Start with where you want your first recessed light placed and go from there, for example, above the stove for the first light in the kitchen. This first light becomes your focal point and the place that you will start from when adding other lights.

Avoiding shadows

Shadows can be a pesky occurrence that is totally avoidable when installing recessed lighting. The best way to avoid shadows is to place your recessed lighting exactly 3 feet away from the wall. You never want shadows in the corners of the room, it tends to create a visual effect of lowering the ceiling and making the room smaller. The lights need to reflect off the wall at the proper distance in order to make the room look larger rather than smaller.