Kitchen and living room lighting

We spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what kind of lighting we wanted for the kitchen and living room, the 15x30 one story “great room” with cathedral ceilings.

For kitchen work, track lighting with spot bulbs looked like it would provide enough light. But most track lighting that you see in big box stores is ugly and bulky, because it’s typically a 120 volt system, and all that dangerous voltage has to be hidden inside metal conduits. Low voltage track lighting is usually slimmer, but has the downside of requiring a bulky transformer somewhere. Then there are the fixtures themselves, which often have an industrial look more suited for clothing stores. After a long search, we came across a monorail system made by Tech Lighting, which is pretty slim, and has some whimsical fixtures as a nice bonus. We installed one of these systems in the kitchen over the main counter area:

The fixtures include a couple of dragonflies:

and three metal men:

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For the living room areas of the great room and the sink island, we chose some pendants made by a forge in Vermont. They were expensive, but nothing else we looked at seemed as attractive. Most lighting companies use unnecessary frills to make their products look fancy, but we wanted something simple. We suspended the lights from the rafters, with the electrical boxes hidden in wooden supports that we attached to the collar ties.

Power to the all the lights in the house is supplied by wires running up the posts and rafters in Wiremold raceways. Using the raceways avoided the need to build wooden boxes, false walls, or other structures to hide the wires.