The Ultimate Open-Plan Kitchen

Mixing warm and cool light in one area, or in a single fixture, is one way lighting designers approximate natural light indoors. That's important in this case, where the kitchen "borrows" daylight from the open plan's windowed living area. To wash the island in what she calls "balanced light"—ambient light that is bright enough to work under—Lopergolo took advantage of a pair of five-socket, drum-shaped aluminum factory fixtures salvaged from the raw loft space, filling each with two compact fluorescent and three incandescent bulbs. Their drama is offset by a simple row of dimmable halogen floodlights screwed into $4 porcelain sockets between the fixtures and the vent hoods.