LUX magazine reports that like most people in the lighting business, I’m often asked by acquaintances for advice. Usually, my friend’s building project has come to a crucial stage. I receive an email with the subject line ‘Urgent lighting advice’, links to the John Lewis website and the comment, ‘What do you think of these???’
Needless to say, at this stage no one wants to hear me spouting off about design concepts or reinterpretations of the architecture. They want me to endorse their tasteful choice of luminaires from John bloody Lewis. My brother and his wife once proudly showed me their £4,000 installation of Chinese LED downlights which put splodgy pools of light on the carpet and nowhere else. ‘Very contemporary,’ I said.
No one, as far as I know, has ever acted on my advice. So I thought I’d compile a list of some general principles of lighting for my acquaintances to ignore. These are not all mine; most are accepted orthodoxies. And they’re general principles – for each a professional could come up with a further list of caveats and addendums. But if you follow them, I believe you’ll create a far better scheme than the average. And if it stops someone spending £4,000 on downlights, I’ll have done my job.
1 Use a professional lighting consultant if the budget permits.
2 Think first about the lighting you want to achieve rather than the technology.
3 Maximise daylight if you can.
4 Light for the people who’ll use the space and their tasks.
5 Invest in the interior: the secret of good lighting is having good stuff to light.
6 Layer the light: ambient, then accent and task.
7 Light the walls rather than the floor.
8 Light the ceiling rather than the floor.
9 Don’t be afraid of darkness (at least pools of relative darkness).
10 Never ‘floodlight’ a building – you’ll flatten it.
11 For exteriors, pick out architectural details unseen in the day.
12 Be brave enough to use colour in any scheme, but only as an element.
13 Don’t obsess about uniformity; it’s overrated.
14 Follow the codes and regs, but they’re no substitute for common sense.
15 The most efficient light is the one you’re not using – use design to reduce energy use.
16 It’s better to use lots of low-output lights rather than a few higher-powered ones.
17 Conceal or integrate the majority of light sources.
18 For groups of pendants or wall lights, use odd numbers of fittings such as three, five or seven to achieve the ‘harmony of repetition’. It works!
19 It’s better to use pendants decoratively rather than as the workhorses of a scheme.
20 Consider control at the outset – different tasks and times of day need different light levels and even colour temperatures.
21 If the controls aren’t simple to use, they won’t be used. Give users four labelled buttons (‘meeting’, ‘presentations’, ‘lunch’, for example, and an ‘off’).
22 Don’t assume compatibility between lamps, drivers and dimming controllers: test them.
23 Buy lamps (and even LED luminaires) in batches to ensure they match in colour and output.
24 Don’t assume a high CRI number will ensure good colour rendering (it doesn’t include strong reds, for instance). Find out the product’s R9 value.
25 Buy from reputable manufacturers – otherwise it’s a false economy.
26 Don’t be missold by optimistic maintenance factors. You don’t want a dim space in three
years’ time.
27 Know what warranty you’re getting by reading the small print. Better still, write your own.
28 Futureproof your project: Make sure you can replace failed lights with matching kit.
29 If there’s no maintenance plan, assume the scheme won’t be maintained.
30 Finally, if you can’t find all the numbers you need on a spec sheet, don’t buy the product.
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