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

Visit to the Arc show - 2

This year, I finally visited the Arc show in Islington. I was meant to visit many times the past years, but always had a reason not to go. Lighting is very important in interiors, and is one of my special interest, so I really couldn’t go on and on finding excuses not to go!

As I mentioned already, LED lights are at the front of the stage. More and more manufacturers propose all sorts of LED lights. Of course, LED has an easy application for outside lighting as well as in retail where a strong white light can be used. For residentail application, it wasn’t so easy to use LEDs, and manufacturers have been working hard on warming up the light provided by the LEDs.
A first example is shown on the following photos, the four boxes are different LED lights and give a quite different result from the coldest (bottom left) to the warmest (top left). The best would have been to have a LED next to another sort of light such as a halogen for example.





Here is another example of different warmth of LED lights




It looks like warm LEDs can now be used in a domestic place without making us look too scary.
Of course, there are some application with no risk at all including stair lights, cupboard lights, under cupboard light, floor light and lighting all the other places which are not the main living areas. But it looks like we are now going to be able to use LEDs in the main living areas, if we use the best warm LEDs sources.
LEDs are wonderful to create atmospheric lighting, using coloured lights for example onto a structured surface as see on the following examples.








Another very interesting application of tube lighting I have discovered is to incorprate the light directly on the rails, holding your clothes. I really liked the idea that the clothes would be directly light making it much easier to select our clothes in the cupbaord.

I also have enjoyed looking at glittery light fittings. The light source is a very simple down lighter that direct a source of light onto crystals that glitters and on which the light bounces all around. This sort of fitting is quite spectacular and would suite every house. Szwarosky crystal was used in the following ones:

Glass was used to create this interesting bubbly "tiles" that can be used to create a light fitting, or can be light from underneath or just as a mirror frame. The vendor told me it was used by one of their clients as the tiles in the bottom of a swimming pool! How fantastic!

Emmanuelle Lemoine

Products from the following ompanies are featured in this blog
Ecoled

Lumentube

Crystal caviar s.r.o.

Windfall

Occhio

Visit to the Arc show-1

It is funny how the weather can influence my ability to do things. During the nice season, I am extremely happy to go to trade shows, and I still am in October, but from November I find it harder to leave the comfort of the practice, I suspect the limited amount of day light to be part of the cause for this.

So, this morning was no exception, it was hard to motivate myself to go to the Arc Show, a show I had never been to, but which sounded extremely interesting as it is about lighting, and I love lighting and lighting schemes. For me, a wonderful design scheme badly lit is only going to look average, whereas an average scheme well lit will look fantsatic.

I finally managed to push myself outside and went to the business centre in Islington. Of course, as soon as I arrived there, I completely forgot about the weather and light-bathe under all the shiny light spots.

LED lights are all over the place and have been presented as extremely powerful and economic, the remaining problem being their very cold colour, making them difficult to use in residential interiors, unless you were attracted to the ghost look. In the last few years, LEDs have evolved dramatically and are now offering a full range of light temperature from the coldest to the warm range, willing to compete with the halogens lamps.

I remember back in September (100% Design) a manufacturer displaying the same vase of flowers lit by a halogen source and a LED and challenging you to find which one was which. I was surprised to see that both lights were similar, but I still could identify quickly the LED and the Halogen one.
Today, LED lighting had again the first place in the show, but I couldn’t find any exhibitor displaying both the LED and halogen together.
Let me sort all my photos out and I will show you my findings very soon.



Emmanuelle Lemoine