What Makes a Good Design – is it Aesthetics, Function or a little bit of both?

So an example of functional pieces of hardware or accessories for cabinets and furniture is LED strip lighting. What we use and trust the most is Tresco LED Lighting.

The Tresco LED Lighting we use is a high quality, high lumen dimmable LED strip lighting, the lighting has a self-adhesive backing on the back, which can be peeled off and can be applied to the bottom side of the cabinet.

This lighting when applied to the bottom of the cabinet is functional and will provide great lighting, however the aesthetics are very limited. When looking under the cabinet or furniture you can see all of the wiring and all of the LED strip lighiting.  In addition to seeing the exposed wires and lighting this also provides a challeng in kitchen settings where food and splatters from cooking can coat the light strip which is messy and hard to clean.

A solution to this problem is an aluminum extrusion designed to hold the LED strip lighting.  The benefits to the LED Strip lighting are not only to keep food and splatters off, the aluminum extrusion also helps dissipate the heat and allows the lighting strip LED to last longer. In addition to the heat dissipation benefit, the extrusion allows a diffuser lens to conceal the lighting.  The lens helps diffuse the light diodes and gives them more even light (reducing those “dot’s” of lights on your countertops). Having an aluminum extrusion is definitely better, it is 100% functional and 100% more aesthetically pleasing!

With the LED aluminum extrusion we have lots of options to add finished bottoms to the bottom of the cabinets, we call this a flush bottom.

So when we use a flush bottom’s underneath the cabinet or furniture, with an aluminum extrusion that gets Dado’d in, we also use the LED lens as a diffuser.

Depending on the level of detail and budget on a project sometimes this doesn’t allow for Flush Bottoms, but we still have other LED Aluminum Extrusions to use under the bottom of the cabinet that meets most basic budget requirements.

So to summarize LED strip lighting is functional when directly applied to the bottom of cabinets, but it is not fully function and fully aesthetically pleasing.

If you have any questions directly for our products, please email us or check out our Instagram posts for more pictures of these products in use.