The best way to bring a room together is with a clever use of color. But experimenting with color in a kitchen can be a challenge, because a big portion of your space is taken up by necessary appliances that come in boring black, white, or metallic finishes. You can add color despite this limitation through painting your walls a fun color and then matching your dishware, towels, and other accessories to it, but these things tend not to stay on the table tops for very long and therefore aren’t a perfect addition to the color of your room. Your lighting, however, is necessary for a functional kitchen all day and night and doesn’t only come in neutral tones. Incorporating colorful pendant lights into your kitchen is a great way to add style without cluttering your cooking space.
When choosing a new pendant light, you need to first consider what you want your kitchen’s color scheme to be. Matching the lamp shade to your paint or wallpaper is much easier to do than the other way around, so it’s less important you find an ideal pendant light first than know what you want the overall look to be. Use pendant lights to highlight or accent those colors already present in your kitchen to help present a unified space.
While you can match the lampshade to the colors, a spicier way to use color theory is through complimentary colors, which are opposite colors on the same spectrum. For example, blue with orange is the very popular choice for home decorating and other fields like graphic design, but other common pairings are red with green and purple with yellow. Of course, you don’t have to (and often shouldn’t) use the bold, primary versions of these colors, but ones a few steps away on the color wheel – like contrasting a golden yellow with a deep navy blue.
One big benefit of pendant lights is that you can usually buy them either individually or in clusters, so you can have as few or as many lights as you’d like. This is nice when working with kitchens that lack proper natural lighting or have certain corners of the room that don’t get the brunt of your existing lights. If you only need a touch of blue in your kitchen corner, you only have to install one light and not five to get it. Another way to do it would be through analogous (next to each other) colors or warm or cold schemes.
Pendant lights don’t hang particularly low and take up a lot of space like a lot of colorful chandeliers do, and they don’t go to the other extreme of being embedded in the wall and non-decorative like recessed lights (which don’t come in multiple fun colors). No kitchen is well-lit everywhere with only one kind of lighting, so you aren’t limited to just pendant lights – you can mix and match styles until you reach adequate ambient lighting.
Using your lighting as your color source allows for easy changes if you decide to move on from your existing color palette. You can change the shades of many brands of pendant lights without going through the hassle of repainting all your cabinets or replacing matching furniture. It’s a little thing, but adding some color to your kitchen may just brighten your day.
