Room with a view

30 June 2011

The latest in the Lutron Forum Series saw a group of lighting experts gather in London’s St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel to discuss the issues pertinent to hotel lighting, Amanda Allen reports

Ben Cronin: There’s a perception that the reception and foyer areas of hotels get the sexy lighting and other areas such as corridors and bedrooms get the blanket lighting. Is this still the case?

John Bear: Most of the big hotel chains, and even most of the smaller ones, get the lighting in the public spaces somewhere between fantastic and ok, but I think there are many hotels where it does fall down in the bedrooms.

Many guests fall off the plane and into their hotel room, so they don’t get the chance to enjoy the public spaces. If that bedroom is lousy, then that’s a lasting impression.

Ian Howard: The other thing about hotel rooms is that they seem to think that every wall should be lit. They don’t seem to embrace darkness or shadow until you have managed to impress your point on the mock up room and show them.

Alia Centofanti: I think it is about dressing up the light for cleaning, and I understand that, but not having dimming in the room is a bit ridiculous. I know it’s more expensive but you would normally have scene settings in your public space which is fantastic – you have your daylight setting for the different times of day, which is perfect, but operators just don’t want to spend that money on the bedrooms. Gary I don’t know if you take that approach in your hotel?

Gary Lohan: In the rooms in our hotel we’ve got a dimmer which centrally dims all the lights so the problem there is actually finding the right solution, at the right colour temperature and something that won’t flicker, but in the public spaces we have scenes. But if something goes wrong or someone alters it, you’re in trouble.

Alia Centofanti: Yes, you definitely have to lock the system. I remember doing scenes for a client once and they didn’t lock the system. All of that work, two days of work, somebody just came along, raised the light level up and destroyed it all.

Ian Howard: We had a scene recently where someone was tugging on electric blinds because they didn’t realise that they were automatic. I had a eureka moment: why don’t we close off the blinds whenever the room is unoccupied? That would probably solve heat gain and loss by about 20 per cent and when the customer puts their key card in, the curtains will slowly open and they will realise that they have actually got automatic curtains.

Lee Prince: Also, in terms of rooms and suites, simplicity of how the controls work is really important. You can have the big clunky touch screen things that look horrible but you might be only staying one or two nights – you don’t have time to figure out the light switching. You just want to come in and turn your lights on at a reasonable level.

Customer is king

Ben Cronin: I just want to ask Gary about feedback from guests. Do you get feedback about control systems in bedrooms or the use of LEDs? Has anybody noticed them?

Gary Lohan: We have put in LED downlights and nobody has noticed a change.

John Bear: But have they said that it’s a nicer space?

Gary Lohan: Yes, definitely – because of the drama of the coloured lighting. You can actually make this cost saving and then invest it in something more dramatic. You could use projectors to put something else like a colour or an image on the wall. But the downlights nobody can tell the difference.

Ben Cronin: What are the minimum functionalities you are looking for when you are specifying a hotel bedroom lighting system?

Gary Lohan: Well up and down basically. I think so long as the lighting is not garish you want full dimming all the way down.

Alia Centofanti: Even just giving a reference to what it is the lighting does is really important, especially in meeting rooms. You can go into a meeting room and there are all these lovely buttons but who knows where to even start with them?

John Bear: I was talking to someone at Google the other day. They are working on a system for – not lighting-related – how you select your programmes off a TV. Rather than working from your zapper you can type in, like a Google search, and say “give me all the tennis programmes” so you’re not having to go up and down menus. I think if we could do that in lighting it would be pretty amazing.

Martin Preston: In terms of feedback, the one thing that we hear over and over again is that it’s over complicated or they can’t find the controls. A common problem in many hotels is where you have got one switch and one light and no function for the rest. Some are just table lamps with light switches, some are off the wall by the bed and you can guarantee that when you get into bed, you flip the switch off but half of the various lamps around the room are still on.

We obviously want everyone to have dimming but what we also do is controlled switching and that’s what people want. People only want a certain amount of control and it has to be easy to understand. It’s no good giving someone, who’s staying in a room for one night, 20 different selections; they just won’t bother with it.

Creative clients

Ben Cronin: Alan you worked on the W Hotel in Mumbai where lighting is very much part of the brand. Would you say this made it an easier project to work on?

Alan Mitchell: We did a walkthrough of the new W Hotel in London with the manager and a lot of it was focussed on how the lighting was such an integral part of how the hotel works. W as a brand isn’t about being a hotel, it’s about being a party space. It’s a lot more about a nightclub environment, so the understanding of controls and lighting is already there from day one.

Ben Cronin: We haven’t really touched on exterior lighting but that’s also a big part of the W brand isn’t it?

Alan Mitchell: Yes one of the things that we’re looking at with the W in Mumbai is to use LEDs integrated into the glazing system. At the first meeting we had with the client we mentioned the idea in principal. It was an idea we developed with Saint Gobain a few years ago for a job in Dubai that’s still on hold. We knew the cost and the technology and we floated some figures in front of the client, presenting the idea, which is effectively lighting through the glass. But, because you’ve got the fritting on it, you’re bringing it alive.

John Bear: So you’re actually making the building a light fitting?

Alan Mitchell: Yes, exactly. It will be a huge glowing icon in the sky. Although we said some ridiculous figure of £3 million just to do the external lighting, he didn’t even hesitate at this figure. All he could see was this glowing icon, his building, that’s looking down on the whole of Mumbai.

To him £3 million is a good investment but it’s rare to get a client to even think about that. There are alternative ways to do it, and we’re looking at projectors from the outside of the building but instead of using very low-watt LEDs integrated into the building we would be looking at 7kW xenon floodlights to get to the top. In terms of cost it’s going to be a lot less initially, butit’s going to cost an awful lot to keep it running and the maintenance of those lamps is horrendous.

Lee Prince: I’m wrestling with my conscience on this. Here we are talking about reducing energy consumption by using a 3W lamp instead of 40W and you’re talking about throwing 7kW light across a building. Why would you externally light a building unless it’s got a significant value? Aren’t we just throwing energy out the back door to pander to the egos of the hotel owners? You look at the Shard in London – would you light that building? I wouldn’t, it’s just throwing energy away. You know we’re building glass boxes in the dessert in the Middle East and we’re worried about the energy of a light fitting!

Alan Mitchell: Absolutely, I’m not saying in any way that we want to do this. Obviously at the start, we’ve seen this tower and thought wow that is stunning and it’s going to be amazing to light it, and in some ways it’s the ego of the lighting designer going: “well look at this palette we’ve got to work with”.

There was another job we’re working on which is a couple of towers in Abu Dhabi and a Chicago lighting designer has done the original concept for the exterior. The first thing I said to the client was: “You’re over-lighting the building. You need to do something around the entrances, something up at the top if you want to be seen in the sky and nothing for the rest of the building. It doesn’t need it. There will be enough to sell the building at night.” They didn’t agree – they wanted the full building lit and I still think that’s really wrong.

Alia Centofanti: I think accent lighting is important, if you’re going to accent the architecture that’s important.

Alan Mitchell: Well that’s how I wrestled with my conscience and solved it for the W in Mumbai! If, for example, we presented the LED solution and he said: “No, I don’t have the money for that,” at that point we may present the alternative but we will be highlighting the energy and maintenance costs of the option. We did a similar solution 10 years ago in a project in Malaysia, we actually replaced old-fashioned lighting, you know 400W lamps that weren’t really doing anything with some higher xenons and we’ve got the energy levels down by 50 per cent, but it was still a fairly high amount of energy, and two years later it wasn’t being maintained, so a waste of money in our eyes.

Lee Prince: There is nothing worse as a lighting designer than to leave a project and go back a year later and half the lamps are out or they have replaced them with the wrong colour lamps and the composition is completely ruined.

Winston Goh: It’s the same for designers as well, you come back and they have downgraded all the light bulbs or they have reduced the wattage. You would have specified 60W and you’d go back and they’d have dropped it down to 40W to save costs which is fair enough but then you go into a room and it’s too dark and dull.

Alia Centofanti: And that was the reason you did the design in the first place – to stop that from happening!

The participants in the Lutron Forum were:

● Alan Mitchell, Neolight Design

● Alia Centofanti, Dexter Moren Associates

● Amanda Allen, Lighting

● Ben Cronin, Lighting

● Bruce Griffin, Lutron

● Gary Lohan, Sustainability manager, One Aldwych Hotel

● Ian Howard, Lighting Force

● John Bear, BDP

● Lee Prince, Light and Design Associates

● Martin Preston, Lutron