Hospitality without hostility

Feb 2009 | By Richard Brass

Leading lighting and interior designers met in London to share their ideas on the challenges of working together, and with operators, when lighting high-end hotels.

Carl Gardner: Despite the credit crunch, high-end hotels are predicted to remain a bright spot in the hospitality sector. What sort of brief do lighting designers receive?

Maurice Brill: Briefs are very dependent on your client and the operator and who the investor is, and they’re all clashing influences. For a lighting designer it’s quite a balancing act. You sometimes have a lot of masters to please at the outset. I find it’s very unusual to get a very clear brief.

Terry McGillicuddy: Interior designers begin a project with our idea of what the interior’s supposed to be like, but we don’t have the expertise and the technical back-up that lighting designers have, and therefore we need lighting consultants to come in and help us achieve our vision. I see it as a team. It’s not me saying: “This is what I want you to do1

The early bird
Carl Gardner: Are clients in the high end of the market now sufficiently clued up to always have lighting designers on at the beginning of the project?

“I shy completely away from colour unless it’s perfect just for that situation. Let the interiors sing, don’t overcomplicate things”
Michael Curry, DPA Lighting Consultants

Michael Curry: I think we are heavily supported by clients and interior designers now. Coming in too late is obviously a problem, but coming in too early can equally be a problem. You almost want to keep the design and the client and operator separate at the very start and make sure that your M&E consultant is on board at the beginning as well so they’re not going to be putting loads of additional light fittings in that you don’t want.

Tony Ingram: Once you’ve clarified the vision and set that out and articulated it, things follow on. There’s frequently the problem of the operator coming in at a late stage, which can undermine a lot of the decisions that have been made at earlier stages. The vision must be defined and articulated it in a way that makes it undeniable.

Lee Prince: Operators, although they’ve got the business plan at heart, are extremely conservative when it comes to interior design or the feel of a space. When they come in late the original big idea begins to unravel. Sometimes they have too much input into the look and feel, rather than sticking to the business plan.

Alan Mitchell: It’s difficult when you don’t have an operator until almost the day of opening, and then suddenly a new brand appears which is different to the big design idea that went ahead.

Maurice Brill: The other clash that you frequently come up against is a strong operator, and that can then become a clash of wills over what the final result is going to be. We currently have a project that’s been redesigned four or five times at the sky bar level, because it’s seen more as a personal toy for the owner than it is as an investment.

Below the high end
Carl Gardner: Are there fundamental differences between the high-end hotels and the middle hotels in terms of these kinds of things?

David Morris: The big problem once you step below substantial five-star is convincing the client to pay fees for a lighting designer. There’s an expectation from the client that that particular expertise is inherent in your interior design practice. As we all know, great lighting can turn a very average design into a very stunning environment, and bad lighting will kill a brilliant interior.

“When the operator came on board he said: “It’s far too dark and I want another hundred downlights, just stick them in the middle”
Alan Mitchell, director, Neolight Design

Carl Gardner: Most hotels claim to be customer-led. Is identifying the customer discussed as part of your brief process?

Lee Prince: What quite often drives the brief is luxury and pampering. The real success of the lighting designer is a thing I call eco-luxury, where you can blend environmental issues and still provide the sort of luxury at the high end that the operator and owner are looking for.

Maurice Brill: I have two particular operators who took the time to sit down with me at the outset and describe their guest type. So you have a clear picture in your mind of what is expected for that particular character.

Tony Ingram: A lot of time is spent discussing experience, what is the nature of experience. And ultimately, rather than the word luxury, the word I like to use is comfort. That implies an ease, and that means for me making things as simple to use as possible.

Alan Mitchell: We found that as well on the control side of it. A lot of the people that we deal with want to put dimming systems in the suites, because people have got that at home and they want the comforts of home, and part of that is a very simple, intuitive control system within the suites, and for the rest of the hotel a control system that nobody touches, so that you don’t have the waiter trying to change it, so they can leave the hotel and know it’s working perfectly.

Keep away from the kitsch
Carl Gardner: Standardisation is a necessary aspect, maybe not at the five-star end, but below that. But we’ve all argued for a long time that hotels should have local culture, local flora, local fauna, local design cues, embedded in them. How do we do this without becoming kitsch?

Alan Mitchell: It’s difficult if the client wants kitsch, and that’s a problem, particularly in the Middle East. It’s how to educate the client that what he’s doing is maybe not correct, when he’s the one paying the money and he’s a local. So we do a lot of listening, potentially try and educate, pare it down, give them the essence of a design but without being too obvious.

“The big problem once you step below substantial five-star is convincing the client to pay fees for a lighting designer”
David Morris, director, Proof Consultancy

Lee Prince: Some of the architecture that preceded the Georgian period that has been turned into hotels or conference centres has its own areas where you can conceal light fittings and use light to celebrate the architecture.

Michael Curry: It’s important not to get on the fashion bandwagon. We’ve got that in lighting as well, and colour’s an interesting one, because I shy completely away from colour unless it’s perfect just for that situation. Let the interiors sing, don’t overcomplicate things. As lighting designers we need to make sure that we don’t overdo it, don’t use LEDs everywhere, energy efficiency is really important, but use it where you need to use it and don’t lose the quality just because LEDs or energy-efficient lighting is the in thing at the moment.

Heavenly hallways
Carl Gardner: Let’s talk about corridors. We’ve all been to even very good hotels where the corridor completely lets it down. What can you do about that?

Alan Mitchell: That’s where lighting can really play a big part. One of the hotels we did, we said to the operator at the start: “When you come out of the lift we want the corridor to be part and parcel of the whole experience, it’s got to have some kind of a rhythm or a flow1 They bought into that, we did some very simple, inexpensive things, it looked fantastic. When the CEO of the operator came on board he said: “It’s far too dark and I want another hundred downlights, just stick them in the middle1

Carl Gardner: Why do hotels not use clever PIRD systems, etc?

Debbie Wythe: It’s fear of it. I’ve done quite a lot of work on a country house hotel, and they wanted work on their corridors. They were happy with the very low level of light, but they wouldn’t do the PIR. They were absolutely petrified that they would come off or on and no one had control of it. Their key interest is that their clients have the most amazing experience and it’s so easy for them that they don’t have to think about anything. If lights were going on and off it would be something that would annoy a client.

“The dining room is the breakfast room, the lunch room and the dinner space, and the interior and the lighting have to respond to those”
Debbie Wythe, Lighting Design International

Maurice Brill: I’ve had incredible battles over corridors. You always start off with lots of ideas and they usually get whittled down and whittled down and even though you may have a very accepted scheme at the outset it’s one of the first to get cut. But even if you can get it through, control has always been a very moot point. Corridors seem to be a very difficult area to win the battle on.

Carl Gardner: Are the principles of interior and lighting design in bars and restaurants in hotels any different to what they are in standalone restaurants and bars?

David Morris: I think you have to work harder when you’re doing food and beverage environments in a hotel because they have to be more convincing that they’re a place you want to stay and spend some of your money, because invariably you’re in places where there’s very good choice outside of the hotel.

Debbie Wythe: It depends on the size of the hotel as well. That room has to work really hard. If it’s the dining room, that means it’s the breakfast room, the lunch room and the dinner space, and the interior and the lighting have to respond to those, but in a way the lighting has to work harder in that during the day it has to be a comfortable, almost canteen type of space, but in the evening be seductive so that people don’t disappear out into the city.

Efficiency illuminated
Carl Gardner: What is the impact of Part L energy regulations and energy-saving on hotel design? How is it changing what we do in hotel lighting?

“Gyms are overlit. I’m sick of seeing white walls, timber floors and a sprinkling of downlighters. A lot of people don’t want to be seen”
Lee Prince, Light and Design Associates

Alan Mitchell: I think as a profession we’ve always been interested in energy efficiency anyway. The fact that it’s got a name attached to it now doesn’t necessarily change what we do. It’s being sensible about what you light and what you don’t light, the lux levels that you can have in certain areas, not lighting certain areas that aren’t needed, and so on, to save the energy, and doing it creatively, rather than just using a source that’s about saving energy.

Lee Prince: A lot of it comes down to the resourcefulness of the pairing between the lighting designer and the interior designer or architect. If you’re using indirect light, a lot of the natural colours in the space assume the colour of the light that’s being put into the space, so if you start looking at indirect sources and using energy-efficient sources, which we’ve all been doing for many years, then the problem tends to fall away a bit. Where we’ve had problems is when we’ve been doing hotels in the UK with American interior designers, and they don’t understand why they can’t use tungsten everywhere, and it creates a real rift right at the beginning of the design process.

Reluctant to take control
David Morris: One of the really big issues with energy efficiency is that if you look at the hotel industry, five-star is quite a small percentage of where most people in the world stay. Most people are staying in between two and four-star, and the real challenge is what are the sources and what are the controls you can get. One of the problems we have is that we have a reluctance from clients, even up to entry-level five-star, to use decent-quality control systems. You get a reluctance from them to invest in fittings that would give you better-quality dimming, and if you have to use compact fluorescents with HF packs and so on they don’t want to pay the increased costs for that quality of installation and level of control, which is completely short-sighted because there’s payback if they made that decision. The problem you find is that in some of the big hotel groups their internal project managers have very short-term aims.

Lee Prince: In the lighting sphere technology in terms of controls and control gearing equipment has moved on quite a lot in the past five years, but quantity surveyors, who are normally involved right at the beginning of the project, who set the cost plan and the budgets, haven’t taken any cognisance of the fact that equipment has become more sophisticated and therefore slightly more expensive. And so, when they start setting the cost plan, although they look at the previous project they did and then give it an x per cent increase, they don’t fully take account of the fact that with the equipment that we now have to use, you can’t just put a tungsten lamp or an MR16 lamp in the ceiling. You have to think greater than that, and the cost plans don’t necessarily reflect that.

Team players
Maurice Brill: One of the issues with even the better-qualified, more knowledgeable operators is that you get distinctly different teams that you work with. So at the outset you’re dealing with the project managers, the design development team, the operating architects, and then later on as they disappear, when you’re handing over the operation you’re dealing with a completely different set of people, the engineers, and they’re the ones that really understand about energy efficiency and control and so on. If you’re very lucky, you can get the engineering team and the hotel operators together at the same time at the beginning, and that is the very best combination, because you can discuss all the merits of control and they will be there and reinforce that with you.

Lee Prince: My experience with quantity surveyors is that it’s in their interest to get that budget absolutely spot-on. I personally deal quite a lot with them, always assisting them - if they’ve got a project, what sort of price would we need to put in for this fitting or that fitting. It’s a great way to get in on a job very early, because they’re appointed on about day three of a project, and by doing that it guarantees that what you’ve got playing in the back of your mind in terms of a design is not unrealistic. Dealing directly with the M&E consultants is another way.

Maurice Brill: That’s a very good point. If the electrical consultants are educated in control, it can be a much easier task, particularly if their budget’s brought to the fore. If they’re convinced of the value of it, and understand it, it’s much easier.

A dip in the pool
Carl Gardner: Spas, swimming pools and fitness areas - what are the particular requirements and demands in hotels?

Debbie Wythe: It’s the only space where you can really use colour. We’ve spoken quite a lot with the masseurs and the people running the spa, and they’ve discussed colour therapy and getting the right colours for their treatments. Keeping it very simple in the control sense for the user, the masseur will come in and set the colour to what they want and away they go.

“If you’re lucky, you can get the engineering team and the hotel operators together at the beginning, and you can discuss the merits of control”
Maurice Brill, Maurice Brill Lighting Design

Alan Mitchell: A lot of it can be done much more simply. Spas have become almost too complicated. The problem I find with colour therapy is that lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon, saying “that’s been in the magazines so let’s do colour therapy1 and they don’t really understand. There are very few spas that we’ve done where the people operating the spa have a clear understanding about why they would want to do that. Personally I think we should get away with using a lot less light in spas and using things like candles. A single candle - what more do you need to make yourself feel really good and comfortable?

Flattery gets you everywhere
David Morris: The key word when you’re doing any lighting in a spa is flattery, because people are very exposed, and if they happen to catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror they want it to look as good as possible and feel like they’re getting some value for money, so I think the bias of the light sources is extremely important, to make sure that people feel comfortable with themselves. And the effect on behaviour and the way that people’s volume levels change completely when you start bringing the light levels down in certain key areas is extremely important in spas. The lighting levels are absolutely key in those spaces.

Lee Prince: Gyms are the same. Gyms are overlit. I’m sick of seeing white walls, timber floors and a sprinkling of downlighters. A lot of people that work out in a gym don’t want other people looking at them and they don’t want to be seen. Conversely, if you’re a weightlifter, you want to feel as if you’re in an environment that’s pretty gritty and urban, and again that lends itself to low light conditions and possibly coloured lighting conditions.

Maurice Brill: But it’s very hard to convince operators of that.

Around the table

The participants in the Lutron/Lighting hotel lighting forum were:
Chairman: Carl Gardner, director, CSG Lighting Consultancy
Lee Prince, director, Light and Design Associates
Terry McGillicuddy, associate, Richmond International
Tony Ingram, design director, 3DReid
Alan Mitchell, director, Neolight Design
Maurice Brill, Maurice Brill Lighting Design
Debbie Wythe, associate, Lighting Design International
David Morris, director, Proof Consultancy
Michael Curry, associate, DPA Lighting Consultants
Martin Preston, sales manager for Northern Europe, Lutron Lighting Controls
Jordan Littler, designer, Blacksheep
Chris Peach, head of Chapman Bathurst