We have a corner sink on our peninsula. Our peninsula has 2 pendants; the corner sink has one recessed light above it. The pendants are controlled by one switch, the recessed light another. The light over the sink is independent of all other lights, recessed or not. Note that the sink light is also quite close to the crown molding. Personally, I think it looks fine. The reasoning behind this setup (yes, it was deliberate), is that when I'm at the sink I only need to have the light above it on, not the pendants, which aren't over it, nor the other recessed lights, which would be behind me and cast a shadow over the sink. I don't know how far apart the lights are (I'm not at home right now to measure), but I do know that the lights work the way they were designed to. I'm happy with them.

For the uplight, you could go a few routes, especially with respect to dimming functionality. And some fixtures don't support dimming, so you need to figure that out. To that end, I suggest you think through the use cases. For example, the use case that I think I'd appreciate most is late evening, after you've retired to another room of the house, at which time a mellow indirect glow from the skylight cutout would be particularly pleasant. You might also want the more light from this source on occasion, in which case you'd want brighter lights on a dimmer. That being said, here's some options. I'm thinking two, centered on the skylights, mounted near the bottom rim of the cutout (just above the beam probably). Regarding the pendant, I know that selecting pendants is hard enough without more to think about, but one downside of a single pendant vs multiple pendants is thhat single sources create worse shadows. And the clear glass pendants above exacerbate this harsh shadow problem by being point sources, whereas the Fillsta, for example, mitigates this problem because it's effectively a uniform 31" sphere of light. This large diffuser also makes it possible to use a brighter source. For example, you could put a 300W equivalent CFL in the Fillsta, but such a bright light would be unacceptably harsh in a point source like the clear glass pendants above.

We like to put one (or more) recessed lights around the island if it includes a work surface (sink or cooktop). The recessed light should be switched separately from the pendants so that it can be turned off when not needed.

We went out to the house today to remeasure the pendant lights. They are off in both directions. I’m going to tell the general contractor to fix them Monday. I just can’t live with them the way they are. I took painters tape and marked the island so he can see how off the mark they are. Lol the water bottles mark the center of the hanging lights. They should at least hang over the blue tape! Thank god this house is almost complete!