A kitchen at night — render to room

Most kitchen renders are rendered for noon. Daylight from a window, cabinets at full saturation, no shadows under the wall units. They are clean — and they are not how anyone actually uses the room. A few years ago we rendered a client's kitchen as a 9pm scene first. The lighting plan that fell out of it is now the way we design every kitchen.

The brief was a dark-wood kitchen with a hand-painted island in a deep green, in a Birmingham terrace with one north window. The day render was conventional. The night render — pendants over the island, undercabinet light along the run, accent inside the glass-fronted larder — was the one the client kept open on their phone.

A render at 9pm is honest about where the light is missing. The day render hides it; the night render shows it. In this kitchen we discovered:

- The pendants were too high. Lowered by 200mm, the pool of light landed on the worktop instead of bouncing off the dark island. - The undercabinet strip needed to be on a separate dimmer from the pendants. The cook wants worktop light at 80%; the diner at the island wants pendant light at 30%. - The glass-fronted larder needed warm LED, not cool. Cool light made the brassware look grey.

We changed three things in the drawings before a single piece of timber was cut.

Dark walnut on the wall run, mid-green hand-painted in-frame on the island, brass cup handles, oak worktop on the breakfast bar. At 9pm the room is candlelit by its own pendants. At 9am the north window does the work the render warned us it could not do alone.

We render every kitchen as a 9pm scene now, in addition to the day render. The room you live in at night is not the room the brochure photographs. The render that is honest about that produces a better kitchen on day one.

If you would like to see your kitchen rendered before we build it, the CGI is included in every design visit. Day scene and night scene, on the same drawing.