I have an entryway that is adjacent to a dining room, and the walkway heads to the great room. (From any of these rooms, you can see all the other light fixtures at once.) I have a mini version of the dining room chandelier in the entryway. They are probably 6 feet away from each other. For our space, I think it looks good....... however, I think it depends on your particular space. Also, because of those two matching lights and the great room fan/hanging light, I opted out of pendants at the kitchen island. I didn't want to overwhelm the space with too much down-lighting...

Our current kitchen is an 8x15 galley. When ew moved in there was an awful (and small) incandescant fixture- 75 watt maximum, lighting the entire kitchen. We quickly replaced that with a Rejuvination schoolhouse fixture. Very attractive, goes with my house, BUT still has never been enough light at 150 watts (single socket). My neighbor, who has the exact same kitchen, put in an attractive track lighting fisture with 5-6 directionals a few years ago. It is fantastic. It lights up the whole space well, and is attatches to a single box. In our remodel, we have chosen to remove the ceiling, for the exact reason that you electrician wisely noted, that punching holes in the ceiling will look like you did exactly that, because it will have to be patched. Recessed cans would show this worst of all. I am not a huge fan of them anyway, so I looked for alternatives to them for myself. We are getting 3 flushmount fixtures, 120 watts each from Restoration Hardware, and doing 2 pendants over the island, as well as some undercabinet lighting. I will probably add some task lighting (wall lamps) at our message center and full length chalkboard as well. HTH! BTW, brickton, I do work for PB, and those are great units for the money. Just don't tell anyone I am using RH lights in my kitchen-- SHHHH! ;)

Katrina, I am very pleased with my new lighting. We installed canopy mounted spotlights. I much prefer the look to recessed lighting, and I like a minimalist fixture for an 8' ceiling. If you use a wide angle bulb (we had to order them) you can achieve excellent lighting. My fixtures are MP lighting canopy mounted spotlights with an aluminum finish (X01 C3 - 1 NS NA 1 - MC). They were expensive and we had to wait for them. Each fixture is connected to its own junction box. Currently they are lamped with wide angle Sylvania Tru-Aim Titan covered halogen (but they can be lamped with SORAA LED as well). We found the Sylvania to be much nicer than the equivalent Philips. The lamp (= bulb) is naked so you see colour from the reflective part on top and the Philips threw harsh pink lines on the ceiling. The lights are on dimmers so energy savings are possible there. Because of the wide angle of the halogen, we only needed six fixtures to light our small kitchen. For choosing ceiling lighting I was inspired by one of my favourite kitchens: Lauren Liess'. As you can see, drywall & painting remains to be done.

If you are replacing multiple lights in the same space, your are far better off to replace the switch. However, here are some amazon search results.