In Spain, buildings are mostly brick and concrete, which means that you have to decide on exactly where you are going to want electrical outlets and wire for lighting BEFORE the actual walls...interior and exterior go up. The wires are embedded. So I need to tell my builder now...as in today or tomorrow at latest...exactly where I want everything to be. Most of it...no real problem. But I am having the devil of a time figuring out what and how many fixtures to use in the kitchen, largely because recessed lights (which I always liked as unobtrusive, allowing me to go for something fun with pendants over the peninsula) are out of the question. That's also because of the concrete/brick construction. No...voids between rafters to tuck cans into. Instead the ceilings are solid concrete so if you want recessed, you have to lower the ceiling. Many people do that in a separate room, but iI have an open plan for a small space and don't want to drop the ceiling either in one part or all over.

On top of that but lighting options are FAR more limited in Spain. Ive been to a dozen stores and poured over online options. The only moderately acceptable choices I can find are 1) round, very shallow ceiling mounted things. Some have just clips holding a white cured disk in place. Others have silver or white metal rings around them, making them look more or less like portholes. They're fairly unobtrusive, but do look rather cheap to me.

The other option is track lighting. The problem with it is that nearly all of it looks quite modern, and my style is traditional/transitional, with a lot of vintage touches, including the pendants I've picked out and love. Plus finding track lighting in the average lighting store i Spain is a challenge....almost all of it is track lighting heads on prefixed bars that simply aren't long enough. But if I knew that was the way to go, I could probably figure out where to put the wires and deal with specifics later.

Need some advice asap, please!