Eco-friendly Refurbishment of a Ladies powder room - The lighting

Lighting is one of my favourite subject, the lighting makes or brakes a scheme! however much you spend on a design scheme, if the lighting is not right, then you wasted your money! When I go to shows, I always spend a lot of time to look at the lighting and see what is new. I have been following the progresses made by LED lighting this last 8 years, and I am now quite happy with their performance.

LED lighting can be extremely white, and when you look at yourself in a mirror lit by white LED, you won't be very happy with the result as what you will see is a ghost version of yourself. I have tried it, and I promise you, it is scary!
If you want to use LEDs, always make sure you use the warmest light possible, as LED still are quite cold.
LEDs can now be used for background lighting, when you choose a warm white, and this is what we did for the Ladies room. All the background lighting is done using LED recessed down lighters. The result is absolutely perfect. I knew it would be as I already had used these fitting in other projects and was very happy with the result.
Not only LED can be used for the background lighting, but they also can be very useful for emergency lighting. As the Ladies room is in a public space, we had to comply with all the rules and regulations, including emergency lighting.
Here is a photo of the old emergency light:

Quite big and ugly, I am sure you will agree! We have fitted very efficient recessed LED emergency lights that you can spot... if you see the green light...
Can you see the green light? Yes, this is the new emergency light, and I have seen it working, it is incredibly efficient for such a small and sleek fitting! (and of course comply with the rules and regulations!)

 

If you look again at the above photograph, you will appreciate how much fun we had when creating the lighting scheme. The Hollywood mirror does sparkle a lot, and its sparkle is echoed by the LED strip we installed under the stair case to light up the mirror fitted on the wall.

 



 

 



Some wall lights lead us to the upstairs area, and add interest to the wall.

A safe path is built following the LED stair lights, that we installed in the skirting of the stairs.

Upstairs we used the same recessed down light fittings for background lighting. Interest was given to the cubicles by adding a LED strip, which created a dramatic effect.

The recess down lighters were placed so they would provide enough light to the ladies at the hand washing basins, and we made sure there would be no dark corner at all in the room.

 More wall lights were used to finish this focal point, surrounding the mirror and giving light to the ladies when looking at themselves in the mirror.

 

The ceiling was lowered the space leading to the fourth cubicle, above the hand washing basins. Installing recessed lights was not an option, so we used another LED stripe, to light up this corner, which added interest to the room. The strip is positioned in such a way that it pushes the wall away and creates an impression of space. 

 



In every projects, lighting is of the utmost importance, and what I can say for this project is that there were many challenges that we enjoyed taking, and you can see the result is an absolute success.

For this project I want to give a special THANK YOU to my electrician who understands what I want to realise and always supports me in my wildest idea. Thank you Graham! Graham Simmons Luxelex http://luxelec.co.uk/portfolio.html

 

 And of course special thank you to Peter Schneiter who took all the after photographs http://www.peterschneiter.com/ 

 

 

Emmanuelle Lemoine