Galaxy Horizon Cabinet Lighting Cabinets

Fabuwood gives this finish a warm grey-taupe value (#989089) and describes it in more than one way: a grey stain with soft pink undertones on the door page, soft taupe tones on another, and misty greys and silvery undertones on the finish page. Those descriptions are not contradictory so much as a record of how it behaves. Fabuwood’s own copy for the finish on another door says it shifts with the light.

People who own it say the same thing more plainly. One homeowner with this stain on her kitchen wrote that on a cloudy day the cabinets can look cold or dull and on a sunny day they look warm, and that it depends on how much natural light the kitchen gets. A kitchen designer who sells the line said it can read warm or cool depending on the furnishings around it.

For lighting, that is useful information. The daylight in your kitchen sets where the stain sits most of the time. The fixtures decide where it sits for the hours when daylight is gone or weak, which in winter is most of the hours the kitchen is used. That is why the plan below starts with the window, not the fixture list.

Answer four questions about the kitchen, on paper, before looking at prices.

1. Which way do the main windows face? As general guidance, north light is cool and even all day, south light is strong and warm, east is bright in the morning and west in the evening.
2. How much of the cabinetry sees that window directly? In an L or a U, one run often faces the window and another sits with its back to it.
3. What is the weather like for most of the year where you live? A kitchen under grey skies half the year will see the cool, flatter version of this stain far more often.
4. When is the kitchen actually used? A household that cooks after dark in winter lives with the artificial light more than the daylight.

The answers sort each run of wall cabinets into one of two kinds. A run in good daylight needs light for the evening and for task work, and not much more. A run in poor daylight, facing away from the window, in a north-facing room or under grey skies, needs light that does more: it is the only warm source that run ever gets.

The list gives you two ways to light the underside of a wall cabinet. Puck sets are matched to cabinet width, from GHZ LED W09 at $74.75 for a nine-inch box to GHZ LED W39 at $152.75, with a single GHZ LED 2-1/4" PUCK at $71.50. Light bars are continuous and sold by length, from GHZ LED FLS24 at $487.50 to GHZ LED FLS60 at $1,027.00 in the Standard housing. Bars give an even wash; pucks give pools of light with softer gaps between.

Spend where the daylight is weakest. On the run that gets good window light, puck sets are usually enough for evenings. On the run that never sees the sun, a bar is worth the money, because that run depends on it for the look of the stain as well as for task light.

The mixed plan in the first two rows comes to $1,433.25 in fixtures, $880.75 less than bars everywhere and with the money spent on the run that needs it. The driver ($204.75), wireless switch ($221.00) and, where runs are joined, mesh connector ($201.50) are separate lines on every route. Whether pucks and bars can share one driver and switch is not stated, so ask before mixing them on one circuit.

There is no single right colour temperature for this finish, because it has two faces and you are choosing between them. Our advice, which is general lighting practice and not a Fabuwood specification, is to decide which of its two reads you bought it for.

If you chose it for the warm, taupe side, the soft pink undertone Fabuwood describes, a warm-white source around 2700K to 3000K will lean it that way after dark and in a room with cool daylight. If you chose it for the silvery, misty side, a neutral source around 3500K to 4000K keeps it there. What we would avoid is a very cool, bluish source in a room that already has cool daylight: the stain then has nothing warm in it at any hour.

If the household cannot agree, or if the room swings between strong summer sun and grey winters, GHZ LED STRIP TUNABLE WHITE 10MM at $286.00 is the one fixture on the list whose colour can be changed after it is fitted. And whichever you choose, check it the way the finish demands: take a door sample and look at it on a grey afternoon by the window, then after dark under a bulb of the temperature you are considering.

The bars come in three housings: Standard, Timber and Walnut. Standard and Timber are priced the same at every length; Walnut costs more, from GHZ LED FLS24 WALNUT at $585.00 to FLS60 WALNUT at $1,098.50.

On a painted kitchen a wood housing is simply a wood accent. On this finish it is a third wood-look surface beside a door whose grain already shows through the stain, and wood next to wood invites comparison. Our advice is one of two things. Either hide the housing completely behind a light rail molding (GH LRM, $149.50, on the light rail page), so the only thing anyone sees is the light; or choose the housing to echo a wood that is already in the room, such as the floor or a butcher-block top, so it reads as part of a scheme rather than a near-miss. The Timber and Walnut names are finish names, so look at the housings before choosing rather than going by the word.

The Standard housing is the safe choice if the fixture will be visible and there is no other wood nearby. It is also the cheapest of the three, alongside Timber.

Undercabinet lighting is low-voltage at the fixture, but the driver is wired to the mains, and that part is a job for an electrician. The simplest time to do it is between the wall cabinets going up and the backsplash going on, when the driver can be placed where it will stay reachable and any cables can be run before the tile hides them. The wireless switch on the list ($221.00) means no switch cable needs to be chased into a finished wall.

Tell us in the design request which runs face the window and which do not, and the drawing will come back with fixtures matched to each run rather than one fixture everywhere. If an electrician or contractor is buying the lighting with the cabinets, our trade program, Captivating Pro, gives trade pricing; there is one program, with no tiers or logins.

The interior of every box in this line is a natural wood veneer, noticeably paler and warmer than the grey-taupe outside. In a glass-front or open-shelf box, GHZ LED CAB INT 48" STRIP at $221.00 lights that interior, and on a grey afternoon it gives the run a warm spot that does not depend on the weather. It is the smallest spend on the list that addresses the daylight problem directly, and on a run that faces away from the window it is worth considering for that reason alone.