Fitted kitchen

Briefly there are a few good reasons why a recessed light should never find its way into any home ever again.

1. Down lighting makes people look bad. Go stand under a can light and have someone take a photo of you. Looks like you haven’t slept in a week. Yuck.
2. Recessed lighting is inefficient. At 8’ your recessed light will give you a paltry 4-5 square feet of light. Moreover the light will be relatively low; ‘navigation light’ not ‘task light’. What will take you 6-8 can lights to achieve could have been accomplished with two 14 watt bulbs in a semi-flush fixture.
3. It is expensive. How many recessed lights does it take to light a room? If you design the wiring for efficiency you will be placing each 25% segment of the lights on a single switch. (clustered or spread)
4. There are so many better ways to illuminate a space (naturally and artificially) that it seems like a crime to resort to something with such poor function (and aesthetic).

And if those are not good enough.. here are some more reasons why not to install recessed lights.

5. Recessing anything into an exterior plane is just a bad idea. It is bad enough that we have wires running through those spaces, do we really think installing a highly conductive metal sieve makes any kind of sense. (No, there is no such thing as an air tight recessed light. Go ahead and pour some water in one and let me know if any gets out.) While we are at it, tell the low voltage guys to get their hardware out of those planes as well.
6. It is very difficult and expensive to insulate properly around a can light (IC rated or otherwise). In order to legitimately claim you have insulated properly you need to have a continuous value of resistance. That means R-60 at the ceiling, sloping up over the top, and at the top. If you are using a loose product like Cellulose or blown-in fiberglass you have no way to “ramp” 2 feet of material.
7. I have seen far too many basements that are loaded up with 30, 40, 50, 60 recessed lights, all incandescent bulbs, on three or four switches. Consider the wisdom behind installing a series of metal boxes with a heating element inside in a joist-bay, especially in old houses where there is no rim-joist insulation. Am I the only one who is thinks pressurizing a chamber that has only 1 ½” of wood separating it from the exterior is perhaps not the most intelligent of practices.

I’m curious as to your disaproval of recessed lighting in kitchens. I’ve always found recessed lights to be a great option for general lighting in kitchens, particularly kitchens with standard 8 foot ceilings. With the advent of dimmable CFLs and LED trims they also continue to be a good choice for sustainable design. What is your issue with them?