Positioning Your Pendant Lights Perfectly!

Pendant lights are a super popular and stylish way to add some luxury to a home without spending a small fortune.

As specialists in lighting installs, we’ve worked with our fair share of pendant lights. We’ve installed some super cheap pendants, and we’ve installed pendants that have come from Europe and cost thousands of dollars. In both cases, knowing how to install the lights can make a big difference in its overall effectiveness.

There’s a few rules we’ve picked up over the years that can really help.

Pendant Lighting Purpose

One of the first things you need to do is make sure you understand the purpose of the pendant light you’re getting. Believe it or not, there’s more than one reason you could get a light put in (yeah that news kind of surprised us too) and that reason can affect the installation.

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Reason 1: General lighting

Yup, you might have gotten the pendants to legitimately be the main source of light in an area.

If that’s the case, you’d want a pendant with a light diffuser, or use semi opaque bulbs, so you’re not casting a circle of bright in your area.

Reason 2: Task lighting

The next reason is to help with a specific task (like maybe when you’re working in the kitchen, or in the office).

A designer told us this one: for task lighting, you want pendants that are open at the top so the light underneath isn’t too harsh.

Reason 3: Accent or feature lighting

Probably a fun one for many people, you might be using the pendant to highlight a specific area.

If that’s the case, you might want a dimmer switch to give some more versatility to the light.

Room Size

Generally, the bigger the room the bigger your pendant can be.

If you’ve got a small room, you want to make sure that you get something that’s not too massive – because then it can look cluttered, or affect the visibility in the room.

But at the same time, if you’ve got a big space then you can’t get something too small – otherwise it will look embarrassing and lonely.

Positioning your pendant lights

Bunnings have a good awesome blog post that covers pendant lighting positioning, so we’ll unashamedly share some of the information they’ve got on their post.

Firstly, we’ve got a bunch of images (straight from Myer – thanks guys) that have handy measurements of how to place the lights. You can click on an image to open it full size.

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If you want to learn more about positioning and measurements, we’d recommend checking out the post from Myer.

Of course Myer, just like anyone that works with lighting, will recommend you get a professional electrician to help install your lighting. Lucky for you, we’re professional electricians that specialise in pendant lighting installations in Sydney.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to get some more information.