I am still gathering ideas for lighting my kitchen. (I don't want to fit downlighters in the ceiling due to constraints of joist directions). One idea is a couple of modern circular fluorescents - another is to make something like a pane as illustrated in this:
Kitchen lighting is often covered in this newsgroup. One common recommendation from myself and others is to use hidden fluorescent lighting on cupboard tops reflecting off a brilliant white ceiling. This is augmented with task lighting where required, e.g. under cupboards over worktops.
I've done the lighting in a number of kitchens, and when possible, I use this scheme. Reasons for not doing so are cupboards which go right up to the ceiling, or householders who for some reason don't want that scheme. Frankly, nothing else comes even close for effectiveness. Unless your kitchen is just for show and not functional, you need really good general lighting, and that's very difficult to achieve using any kind of trendy style lighting, as it's mostly designed for appearance rather than function.
That doesn't mean you can't have style lighting too, and many kitchens aren't only used for food preparation, so I certainly wouldn't suggest ignoring style lighting, which you can regard as part of the decorations. However, treat it as something separate from your general purpose lighting, and make it separately switchable.
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