Why Do Homes These Days Have So Much Recessed Lighting?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing interior lighting as a spectrum of "not enough light" to "too much light," and ideally trying to fall somewhere in the comfortable middle. But that two-dimensional picture ignores the realities of a three-dimensional space, in which all kinds of other variables—temperature, height, shape of bulb, type of bulb, positioning, diffusion—can make a huge difference in whether a space feels good. Maybe more importantly, it can make a huge difference in whether a space makes you look good.

This is why many designers despise the recessed light: a tube up above, like a spotlight flush with the ceiling. These lights can be arranged so haphazardly and so excessively that some designers refer to them as "Swiss cheese" or "ceiling acne." "The trend by a lot of remodelers and designers is just to, you know, stick four recessed lights up in the ceiling and kind of call it a day," says J.P. Ward, an architect at Washington, D.C.-based firm Anthony Wilder.

Recessed lights are so popular that a smaller, snootier backlash has gained popularity of its own. It’s easy to make fun of these things as gauche, tasteless, cheap, unflattering, or lazy. But is there something else going on? Is there something redeemable about recessed lighting?

A brief history

Recessed lighting gained popularity starting in the 1960s, primarily in retail and commercial spaces like stores and offices. It has some advantages in these situations: stores and offices often have low and/or drop ceilings, and adding visual clutter with a large light fixture could make them feel even lower. These lights suffered a dip in popularity towards the end of the 20th century, but have experienced a wild boom in the past decade or so. "Generally speaking, all of our houses, both new and retrofits for renovations, are getting recessed lighting in most of the spaces," says Luke Olson, principal at GTM Architects in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Recessed lights became so popular in modern interiors and renovations because of a few changes in technology and supply chains. "The LED technology has advanced to the point where we're usually doing integral fixtures where the LED is built into it," says Olson. Some of these are sort of modular, so if one goes bad, you can pop the rotten one out and pop another back in. (LEDs themselves last a very long time, but not necessarily the wiring and other components.) For other lights, especially the cheaper or off-the-shelf ones, this turns them into disposable lights which might require new drywall and new installation to replace. 

Recessed lighting enables cornea-scorching amounts of light, very cheaply, in a way that doesn’t necessarily look cheap, because the expensive versions look pretty much the same as the cheap ones. But that doesn’t mean it looks good.

From a design perspective, recessed lights are often styled to be minimal to the point of invisibility: a small white aluminum rim, at most. The combination of the price of LED lights dropping dramatically, small and lightweight hardware, and a fundamentally basic and easy design language have all led to can lights being exceedingly easy to create and ship at scale. Compared with pendant lights, chandeliers, floor lamps, sconces, or most other kinds of interior lighting, can lights are extremely affordable. "If you look more into the specifications, you see that the more expensive ones may have a better color rendering index [a metric comparing how similar colors look under artificial light to sunlight], and have other features and stuff, but normal people don't really care," says Le Pham, an architect at the Bay Area firm 3RStudio. 

But just because recessed lighting is pretty cheap doesn’t mean it necessarily reads as cheap to everyone. "I think some people consider it a high-end built-in kind of light, because in the past, in developments and mass production housing, typically you would just have a switch to turn on the outlet," says Pham . Recessed lighting was, not very long ago, kind of a splurge, an added bonus to new construction compared with a basic overhead light fixture or floor lamp.

Going back even further, there might be a psychological element to the idea that "more light" might equate to "more better." Lighting was, until the mid-20th century, very expensive, whether that was candles, oil lamps, gas lamps, or early electric lights. Having lots of artificial light was a sort of flex. An 1840s English magazine recommended that parties "must always be given by gas light…if it be daylight outside, you must close the shutters and draw the curtains," the better to show off your opulent lighting setup. 

Recessed lighting enables cornea-scorching amounts of light, very cheaply, in a way that doesn’t necessarily look cheap, because the expensive versions look pretty much the same as the cheap ones. But that doesn’t mean it looks good.

Why are recessed lights everywhere?

There are many, many downsides to recessed lighting. For one thing, it’s a small directional bulb blasting directly from above—literally a spotlight. This can be quite nice if what you want is a spotlight; the designers I talked to said they like can lights in specific situations, like to highlight a piece of art, or over a work table. But that kind of non-diffused overhead lighting is not necessarily flattering, no matter how bright it is. "It's not very appealing for people's faces, because you get these shadow lines under your eyes, your nose, and chin. Everybody kind of looks tired," says Ward. This can also make them an awful, and more rare, choice for the bathroom: those overhead shadows make applying makeup and shaving very difficult.

The layout of these lights can also be ridiculous. Olson says that an average family room will typically have nine can lights; even using smaller ones, three to four inches in diameter, that’s an awful lot of holes in the ceiling. There are horror photos all over the internet of much worse setups: recessed lights spaced randomly, as if by a bored teen in an 80s movie chucking pencils at a high school classroom ceiling to plan the layout. This is often because this type of lighting has different requirements than other lights: most of the hardware is actually situated above the ceiling, in the space between floors or between the ceiling and roof, and there has to be room to install them. A beam or joist can force a shift in a regular grid; same with ceiling details like trays or coffers. Lights can’t be placed too close to ceiling fans, in order to avoid a strobe-light situation. Insulation can force the purchase of lower-power fixtures to avoid overheating and house fires. All of these variables can lead to the random splattering effect.

It’s easy to write off something like recessed lighting as ugly, gauche, or trendy. But all the designers I spoke to noted, to varying degrees, that these lights have their place and their uses. Olson notes that, "Ultimately, we're a service industry. We're a client-driven business, and most of our clients want them, and so the main thing is getting them in a way that works for them and also complements the architecture." But the key is not to overload on recessed lights, and not to solely rely on them. The addition of other light sources—sconces and floor lamps especially—can create a much more flattering lighting ambiance. More light isn’t necessarily more better.

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