Secrets to making the most of natural light in your kitchen

Well, all that wishing for hot summer weather appears to have paid off. Apparently, it’s our longest heatwave in over 40 years, which means there’s plenty of sunshine to go around this year! Wonderfully, for many of us this means our kitchens have never looked brighter, with vast amounts of natural light flooding into the undisputed heart of our home.

Many modern kitchens today aren’t just a place for eating, but also for socialising and relaxing, too. And since natural light is so, so important to many of us when it comes to interior design, we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to show you how you can make the most of it!

Freshen up your kitchen’s colour scheme

As expert kitchen designers ourselves, we can say with confidence that natural light is used to its most beautiful effect in bright clean colour schemes. It’s why you’ll often see it being used as a vital element in so many contemporary kitchens. Light, neutral colour schemes allow the light to reflect from surfaces, creating a much brighter space. As an extra bonus, this has an added effect of making the space appear much roomier and more comfortable, too!

As you might expect, whites and creams are usually the most popular colours used to achieve this – as you can see in this Contemporary Family Kitchen, above. What’s more, the shade of such clean colour schemes mean they act as the perfect backdrop for you to add touches of extra personality with accessories, feature walls, or highlight even more vibrant colours.

That’s the approach that our customers Rose and Jim opted for, with the help of the talented Will Hustler at our Blackburn showroom. In their Quirky Social Space, you can see how they’ve strategically used shades of blue to give a striking sense of character to their kitchen, enhanced by the natural light pouring in from the windows.

See things from a different angle with mirrors and reflective surfaces

Mirrors are a beautiful interiors touch well-known for their ability to give a sense of spaciousness to a room (quite apart from being handy in more traditional ways, too!). Obviously, they’re fantastic for reflecting natural light, and you can even have fun with strategically placing them so that they reflect daylight to corners where it normally wouldn’t be able to reach. If you have an L-shaped kitchen, for example, you can hang a mirror at the corner so that natural light from the far end of the room can easily reach the nearest corner. Mirrors come in all shapes, sizes and styles, so you’ve got plenty of options when it comes to matching the style of your designer kitchen.

To use one of our own case studies as another example, you can see how this Modern Open Plan Kitchen has neatly combined the concepts of vibrant colours and reflective surfaces in a single striking feature wall. It does an amazing job of giving the kitchen its own unique sense of character, and during the daylight hours it’s beautifully illuminated by the natural light from the windows.

Think about how you can complement it with artificial light

Judging your kitchen’s own lighting is a skill in itself, and the bigger spaces often demand particular care. The trick is to let light flow through your kitchen. To achieve this, it’s often a great idea to carefully place your feature lighting to illuminate spots that daylight wouldn’t normally reach. To revisit the Contemporary Family Kitchen, you can see how the light shining down from the spotlights above is placed so that it bridges the gap between the two sources of natural light from the windows at either end of the room. That way, it complements the natural light by forming a continuous flow of light throughout the space.

On that note, adjustable lighting is often a brilliant choice to opt for if you can. With adjustable lighting, you can gradually fade it up as the room gets darker and darker, rather than instantly flooding the space with bright artificial light when the sunshine is still only just starting to fade from outside.

Of course, exactly how you use artificial light in your space will depend on the exact layout of your designer kitchen. That’s where we can help! Each of our talented kitchen designers has years of experience behind them, which means we’re the perfect people to help you achieve your exact vision for your kitchen. Why not pop down to one of our designer kitchen showrooms in Manchester, Blackburn or Barrowford, and have a quick chat with us over a cuppa!