Cove & Under-Cabinet Lighting Done Right

Linear and strip lighting done well disappears into the architecture — a clean, even wash with no visible source. Done badly, it's visible hot spots, colour shift along the run, or a strip that's died within two years because it was buried in a cabinet void with no airflow. This guide covers the details that separate a clean, professional result from an amateur one.

Cove lighting — concealment and colour consistency

Getting concealment right is a matter of recess depth relative to strip position — deep enough, and positioned correctly, to hide the light source entirely while still getting a clean, even wash on the surface being lit. Get the geometry wrong and the strip itself becomes visible, which undermines the whole point of a cove detail.

Colour consistency along a run matters more than most people expect. LED binning and batch matching determine whether a long cove run reads as one continuous, even colour or has a visible tone shift partway along — a subtle but noticeable flaw once you know to look for it.

Voltage drop over distance is the other thing continuous runs need attention to — a long cove run without proper power injection will visibly dim and shift colour toward the far end. Check your run against the Voltage Drop Calculator before committing to a single feed point on anything beyond a few metres.

Under-cabinet lighting

Under-cabinet lighting is task-focused, which means CCT and CRI selection matter more here than almost anywhere else in the home — see our guide on choosing the right LED for the full reasoning on both.

Mounting position needs to avoid glare reflecting directly off the benchtop back at eye level — positioned too far forward in the cabinet void, and the light source becomes visible and glary rather than just illuminating the surface below.

Heat management in an enclosed void is the failure mode most under-cabinet installs get wrong. A strip running hot in a sealed cabinet space is a slow-motion failure — see our guide on why LEDs fail early for the mechanism behind this.

Colour consistency — what to actually specify

Solstice's own strip range runs CRI 95 — genuinely high quality, and the standard actually specified for jobs where colour consistency and rendering quality matter. Naming it directly here rather than leaving it at a generic "look for high CRI strip" line, because the gap between a CRI 95 strip and a budget CRI 80 strip is very noticeable once installed, not just a number on a spec sheet.

The "dotty strip" problem — SMD vs COB

A common, avoidable failure: channels where the strip looks visibly dotty or uneven rather than a smooth continuous line. This comes down to two related factors.

LED density matters too — even SMD strip with enough chips per metre for the application can look reasonably even, while a low-density strip stretched across a task it wasn't designed for will dot noticeably regardless of channel or diffuser.

Practical takeaway — a spec checklist

• Concealment: get the recess geometry right so the source itself is hidden, not just dimmed by a diffuser
• Quality and efficacy over a fixed spec: approach each job on its own merits rather than reusing one IP/density number everywhere
• CRI 90+ minimum for anywhere colour rendering matters — task areas especially
• Check voltage drop on any continuous run before committing to a single feed point
• Choose COB over SMD anywhere the strip might be directly visible or glare-sensitive
• Manage heat in enclosed voids — a sealed cabinet with no airflow is a slow-motion failure waiting to happen