Anthony Batt, Managing Director at Optino Lighting, talks about the intricacies of Lighting Design and working with interior designers to deliver experience and efficiency to projects.
Optino is a British brand focussed on delivering excellence in LED Lighting products through to customer service. They pride themselves on delivering a confidential, professional and prompt service, ensuring your project is delivered on time with a highly personal service.
Here, Managing Director Anthony Batt answers key questions about the lighting design process and how Optino can support interior designers with their projects.
What does a Lighting Designer do?
Well-constructed Lighting Design improve homes by design. Personalised bespoke lighting schemes to suit the individuality of your architecture, interior and landscape.
Why would an interior designer instruct a Lighting Designer?
Lighting Design starts with the principle of accentuating spaces in your home, we make suggestions of how features should be lit such as highlighting artwork, washing a soft glow of light into an alcove or create lighting within joinery shelves and wardrobes, whilst not forgetting the importance of task lighting for reading, cooking or home office work, even relaxing in the lounge. All areas can be enhanced with lighting, the knowledge of how to achieve this harmoniously with your architecture is a specific skill and coupled with an interior designers vision, will deliver a unique experience to the space.
We feel good lighting design should be unobtrusive, functional and as discrete as possible. Our experience leads to the best lighting for every area of your project. Some decisions are more technical than decorative – a lighting designer enables both for the best outcome, working with the Interior Designer to compliment the Decorative aspect. Whether you are renovating, building from scratch or extending, hiring a lighting designer is the right move.
Walk us through the lighting design process?
Start with engaging with the client, or the clients representative to fully understand the spacial brief and if they have any specific requirements or important aspect which resonate with them over other aspects. If you have appointed an Architect or Interior Designer, we look to work alongside any drawings they already have and start to review the plans. From the initial design brief, we start to make proposals and build a specification of the lighting required alongside updating and setting out any lighting with drawing updates, controls and circuitry details. We set up client and team meetings to walk through the areas of the design and discuss how and why the design is being proposed, with feedback we can make design revisions and resubmit for approval.
Sometimes we need to extract a vision and demonstrate this concept, we do this via 3D images and design. This enables the client and wider team to visually understand the space with the proposed lighting, it’s amazing with various beam angles for downlights or spotlights, mixture of up lights, linear lighting, pendants and table lamps etc can all work towards creating a space that enhances your spacial experience, yet can be difficult to imagine. Working with the interior designers decorative design intent the 3D visuals help bring the package together. We find this really does add value to the client and can speed up the decision process.
Design Review and revisions will naturally arise throughout the build or renovation phase and this can be phased or as an urgency arises, being flexible to a live working project is key.
Finally, working samples for site meetings along with technical specification sheets to enable the contractors to plan their works.
How does lighting effect materials or objects within a home?
A well-designed home will enrich your space to increase the opportunity to create serenity or a mood lit by your taste. Materials such as curtains, rugs, wallpaper or artwork and sculptures all require an artistic approach to consider the colour of light, the brightness and beam angles whilst being mindful of reducing or deliberately creating shapes and shadows. We would describe the importance of good CRI Colour Rendering Index and where to apply this. Think of this as how well artificial light can be rendered into mimicking the beautiful tones of natural daylight, the closer this value is too 100, the truer this material or artworks colours will be in. This adds true definition, colour, texture and depth where you need this.
Coupled CRI with CCT Correlated Colour Temperature the lower the value the warmer the lighting is. Within the last 10 years LED technology has really eclipsed all other light sources for efficiency, colours ranges, flexibility for dimming and how the light can be controlled. The importance of good warm light with high CRI was a challenging task for Diode manufacturers but we’ve seen great strides in this area which enables us to specify lighting that can really delivery on all fronts.
Are LEDs dimmable?
In principle all LEDs are fundamentally dimmable, it is the connecting power plant that regulates the LEDs current and voltage that determines if that specific LED is abled to be dimmed. Typically LEDs are offered with Dimmable LED Drivers which work to reliably power the LEDs and also act as the secondary dimming interface, the primary dimming interface would be your Dimming controller such as a rotary dimmer, or more sophisticated control systems. We encourage the use of dimming as this will help set the tone and mood of a room better. Functional by day at 100% brightness, relaxing and inviting by dimming the lighting down. We look at the best dimming method for the LED, area and the proposed control systems and specify the correct lighting products to enable this to work seamlessly together.
There is a minefield of dimmable technology, good, bad and indifferent and we will always recommend tried and tested quality manufacturers as this will gives us the best compatibility onsite as some will dim to 10% whilst others will dim to 0.1%.
What else is new with LED technology?
LED Technology moves at a fast pace, it is exciting and challenging to keep on top of such evolutions within an industry, our partners manufacturer the latest products to enrich your experience. We ensure our knowledge is always cutting edge.
We’ve seen a real increase in options of finishes, enabling custom painted finish that match RAL colours or anodised finishes. Material finishes are becoming increasingly popular to ensure you have the best-looking products when not illuminated that blend with the Interior Design.
More manufacturers are creating LED Light engines that delivery two aspects that revolutionise lighting within a home environment. Dim2Warm & Circadian Lighting.
Dim2Warm enables LEDs to better replicate an incandescent lamp, dim the LED and this colour shifts to a warmer light creating a rich warm lit environment, this is exciting to incorporate into downlights, spotlights, up lights and linear lighting which can all work harmoniously in this way, even some traditional lamps styles now have this technology incorporated which means your table or floor standing lamps can be used in the same way via a 5A circuit, which can be controlled globally from a wall dimmer.
Circadian lighting has been around for several years but the introduction of DALI8 has really enabled more cost effective solutions to enable lighting that replicates the sun rise and fall, this will have differing levels of colour spectrum containing a great amount of blue to mimic peak mid-day lighting, or more red to mimic softer sunset. This helps our bodies to synch with the natural circadian rhythm of nature. This is a great example of ensuring the compatible lighting is DALI controlled and technicalities this faces.
The importance of good lighting design whether interior or exterior landscapes is most powerful when engaged early in the projects design phase, enable wiring works to achieve this is fundamental to enabling the designs intent to come to reality.
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