Light, Values, and Stories

By David K. Warfel

Lighting design education is generally focused on tools and techniques, setbacks, beam angles, TM-30 reports, and other critical technical aspects of our profession. As a result, I find lighting design to be the easy part of the business while client relationships present an ongoing set of challenges. Discussing their values and learning to hear their stories may present an easier way of guiding them to better light.

Residential lighting designers seem to encounter two kinds of clients: those that understand the value we could bring to their project…and those that think we are crazy. Our fiercest competition is not from other lighting designers but from a lack of understanding among potential clients.

Most homeowners have never consciously experienced professional lighting design; without understanding, they are doomed to consider the merits of our work solely on price. And a room full of skilled lighting professionals developing custom solutions will never be cheap.

The clients that understand our value will come looking for us, but the rest are homeowners we find ourselves and with whom we patiently build a justification for our existence. This is exhausting work, like building an interstate highway with bricks instead of giant machines that lay down a continuous surface of asphalt. We, as an industry, are still fighting for each brick, each client. I recently discovered that we could build a television show for about two million dollars, a huge sum for one designer to finance but a tiny, insignificant amount if we all joined together. Mass media could be our paving machine, a way of reaching millions of potential clients in a twenty-two-minute episode. Until that happens, we need ways to justify our existence and help clients make better choices about light, and conversations around values and stories can be one effective solution.

For the past few years, my team and I have used a new language of light we developed for the residential market. In previous articles in this series, I outlined most of this language and what we call the five promises of light: Light can help us do better, know more, feel better, focus clearly, and change easily. Light can also help us live our values and tell our stories, but these goals may be a bit more nebulous in the mind of a typical homeowner. Stories? Values? What does that have to do with lighting? As long as lighting costs money, personal value systems have everything to do with lighting. As long as budgets are an emotional subject, stories will be important to lighting.

VALUES

We used to ask homeowners what kind of lighting they liked, what lighting was important to them, what lighting they did not like, how much they were hoping to spend on lighting. Then we discovered that most clients had no idea how to answer the questions; they came to us to be the experts. If they simply opened their checkbook to us and let us apply our expertise to their project, this would be an easy relationship. That happens about as often as you can guess. So we now talk to them about their values, making an effort not to discuss lighting. Four values we have found useful are quality, appearance, wellbeing, and adaptability.

Our quality discussion begins with the question, “How well do you want your home to be built?” There are different levels of construction and finish quality, and understanding the homeowner’s preferences can be very helpful in developing a framework for lighting design solutions. Did the client select a builder based on price alone, or did the fit and finish of their work take precedence over cost? Are they flying to Italy to pick out marble for their floors and working to design bespoke cabinetry for the owner’s closet? Or are they ordering their cabinets from the local kitchen and bath store and picking out flooring based on price? Their answer provides a hint into whether they will be interested in fixtures that work…or fixtures that are expertly crafted of premium materials.

Appearance, which we often refer to as aesthetics, is a critical value to understand while guiding clients to appropriate solutions. Some of our clients want to make a statement visible to every passerby and to every visitor; others will tell us they just want their home to be simple or comfortable, each of which of course is tied to an aesthetic of its own. I find this value especially useful in determining how far to push the creativity of design. Clients who rate appearance highly are often more likely to appreciate striking and unique solutions. Add appearance to quality and we are well on our way to building a profile of the client we can use to guide our recommendations.

Wellbeing is a newer value to consider in our industry, but perhaps the most important. We do not begin the wellness conversation with a discussion of tunable light, but rather a broader exploration of the value of health in their lives. Do they start every day with exercise, bike to work, drink kale shakes, and avoid storing food in plastic containers? If so, it would be a disservice not to help them understand the value of dynamic lighting. Few clients will tell us they prefer to be unhealthy, but exactly how they value wellness will be useful to know in any lighting discussion.

Adaptability or flexibility is the fourth value we often discuss with clients, though I am not convinced we have the language just right. The idea is to work through how long they want to live in their home, how they will use it, and who will visit them. Their answers can tell us whether this is a forever home or just a weekend getaway, whether they use it is a solitary retreat or weekly large family gatherings. Why does this matter to lighting? Would we recommend the same solutions for a weekend beach house as a primary residence? Sure, we could…but that might not reflect their values. If I propose the most elaborate flexible system for a vacation home, the added cost may not make the cut.

Values-based discussions have proven useful in our client conversations and, when mixed with what makes each client unique, provide a glimpse into one final area of exploration: storytelling.

STORIES

I was first exposed to light as a storytelling tool in my theater years and have found that, while no one hands me a script or screenplay when designing a new home, stories are nevertheless present and powerful in residential work. I used story terminology early in my exploration of lighting languages but abandoned it for the easier-to-understand “light for our lives helps us adapt to changes more easily” idea. Perhaps that abandonment was too hasty, a real danger for someone who likes to chase the next shiny object.

Storytelling at its most artificial or heightened could be called theming, the special application of faux finishes we see in theme parks and some casinos, but it need not be so obvious or applied. It is easy to see storytelling at Las Vegas’ Venetian, for example: we are encouraged to abandon the strip for a relaxing stroll through a European town, dining al fresco in St. Mark’s Square and taking a gondola ride on a canal. We want to be those people that vacation in Venice, so we buy into the theming.

How many homes have the same obvious but applied theming? I saw a home recently where the plaster had “chipped away” to reveal brick underneath, implying that this house had been on the Italian hillside for centuries. It was, of course, in a brand-new subdivision on a golf course that had recently been Wisconsin farmland. Meanwhile, the construction industry is building thousands of farm-house style homes in the middle of sprawling developments. Theming is alive and well.

Just down the street is City Center, a development of casinos and hotels that was hailed by one speaker as “the death of theming.” This individual called out City Center as not having an ounce of theming in its billion-dollar architecture, but theming is just as present as in any pyramid or NYC-shaped casino. You just have to look more closely for the story, in this case a story present in its name but not in its reality. City Center is nowhere near the center of a city, and just out its back door is desert and development. It positions itself as urban and cosmopolitan but could be described as just the next trend in theming. How many homes are built today with a story or theme that has very little to do with its surroundings? I have seen mountain-modern homes in cornfields in the Midwest. The style tells us more about the homeowners’ values than anything else.

Each of our lives tells a story that reveals our values; therefore, all our values are embedded in our stories. Stories, however, are more than the four values of quality, appearance, wellbeing, and adaptability added together. Stories are a particular combination of those values, of course, but they are also entirely unique to each client. Our stories are what makes us ,and tapping into that idea can be a powerful tool for developing lighting solutions that work for a client and encourage the client to pay for them.

For example, a client with a desire for the highest quality home may appreciate lighting fixtures cast of solid brass and wrapped in hand-stitched leather, but they may also hate leather and brass and prefer machined aluminum and stainless-steel hardware. Discovering their story can help us make the right choices but, more importantly, help them make the right choices.

ALL TOGETHER, BEGIN AGAIN

Each of the promises of light can help our clients live better lives; wrapping those promises in their values and stories can help clients feel more informed when they make critical decisions that will affect every minute they spend at home. We, as an industry, have a responsibility to educate our clients on why lighting matters to them. After all, who else has the knowledge we possess?

Our challenge, then, is to find ways to educate the client without requiring a midterm exam and term paper. We are called to make the amazing world of light accessible to people who may spend just a few hours of their lives – at most – thinking about how light affects them. We must find ways to help them understand what we do, rather than beating them over the head with technical terminology and incomprehensible lighting calculations. Learning their values and helping them understand their stories are two strategies that can do just that. When we light for their values and stories, we make it possible for them to live better. When more people benefit from what we do, we will no longer need to work so hard to convince others of our value. It will be known.