Budget is a key factor when considering building a new home, or planning renovations, so why spend the money on a lighting designer? As lighting designers, it is our duty to provide the best solutions for your design requirements.
Just as an architect will use experience, knowledge and know how to develop a home that is unique and reflects the needs of its occupants and the surrounding environment, a lighting designer uses experience knowledge and know how to accentuate and enhance the visual experience and physiological comfort of a space. A lighting designer can use light to evoke mood or draw attention.
A lighting designer will also assist to bridge the gap in knowledge for the client. Light is the primary element of which we need to function, yet it is most often taken for granted and more so, even less understood.
Functionality
Every light should have a purpose, whether it is lighting the kitchen bench or highlighting a piece of art. Too often, we see homes where floors are bright and work stations such as kitchen benches and bathroom mirrors are dull or full of glare. This is a result of poor planning and cheap luminaire specification. As lighting designers, we ensure your lights are positioned to optimise functionality and provide tailored luminaire specifications to make sure you have the right light for the right job.
Ambience
Light plays heavily on our psychological and emotive state. Light can make us feel. You may not have consciously noticed, but you have certainly noted its effect. For example, a romantic restaurant feels completely different when compared to a doctor’s waiting room. That is because light creates ambience and ambience effects our mood.
We factor ambience into each design, to ensure we achieve the right mood for the right environment.
Light Quality
Quantifying light quality is not simple. When selecting luminaires, we factor in a variety metrics such as a high and stable CRI, beam angles, dimmability and lumens. As lighting designers, we are aware that quality of light is more efficient than lumens per watt. If the quality of light is poor, so is our visibility and increasing the “brightness” is only as effective as turning up a cheap stereo “it still sounds bad, it is just louder”.
Unfortunately. when specifying luminaires, many builders and electricians will offer products recommended to them by their wholesalers. These products are usually cheap and as easy to move, not luminaires that produce high quality-controlled light. And it is important to note the difference. We often find, in these cheap LED fittings, the LED chip itself deteriorates, negatively effecting the output of light. It may continue to be seemingly bright but fails to produce the same spectrum of light it once did, meaning it no longer produces a high CRI. Along with this, the colour temperature will shift, creating an inconsistency between fittings, leaving the white walls looking like a patch work quilt.