A Symphony of Light: The Art and Agony of Residential Lighting Design

By: GREGG MACKELL, HLB LIGHTING DESIGN

When Editor Randy Reid contacted my co-worker, Stacie Dinwiddy, and me about taking the residential lighting design baton from contributor David Warfel, I started writing on one topic, then another, and it hit me this is hard it has become extremely difficult to design, specify, and implement a great lighting design.

I recently visited NASA in Houston and toured the Saturn V rocket exhibit. While it’s not rocket science, our designs involve tens or hundreds of thousands of decisions and can look similarly daunting. In most professions, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

For those of you who are relatively new to the world of lighting design, you’re probably wondering why the more you learn, the harder it gets.

Every residential lighting designer fights a similar war as our work intersects with every other decision maker on a project. We battle the schedule, the budget and the clashes. We battle HOAs and jurisdictions with their ever-changing codes and unpredictable reviews. We battle the acceleration of technology where unique combinations of components need to play well together. Like a fingerprint, each project has its own combination of electronics in diodes, drivers, dimmers and breakers that could be made in different countries at different points in time.

As we kick off a design, we review the architectural, interior and landscape drawings, renderings and models. We review Pinterest boards and adjacent information provided by the project’s stakeholders.

We then have meetings to set the goals for each project. Is the goal to ensure there are no scary dark corners, or is it to provide appropriate lighting for sitting around a fireplace and watching the snowfall on Christmas Eve? Is the goal to provide appropriate lighting for hosting large fundraisers, or is it to light a museum-grade art collection? We juggle sometimes-opposing opinions of designers, architects, husbands and wives.

Regardless, our goal is always to tailor our design to the project.

We have more questions as we get into the design. What do the vertical surfaces look like? Which ones will have art or built-ins? Will the finishes be dark or light; matte or shiny; flat or textured? How will the room be used and furnished? Will art and furniture be fixed, or do we need to design for flexibility? Is this space public or private? Is the ceiling flat, stepped, sloped, barreled, trayed, vaulted, or is it made of a thin layer of fabric suspended below a void space? Are there decorative fixtures, and if so, what are they functional for? The list goes on…

We go through a similar process for each space as well as the exterior and landscape.

We use the knowledge gained in this phase to lay out the first light in CAD or Revit, then the second and third. Then, we step back to look at alignments with each other and with the architecture. We lay out the next and the next, constantly shuffling the layout to accomplish the necessary function while keeping a sense of order in the ceiling.

To look at how difficult this has become, I’ll break down some of what it takes just to specify a downlight.

In this initial phase, we’ve determined the aesthetic of any recessed lights we may use. Say it’s going to be a square bevel with an open aperture, a satin nickel trim to fade into the greyish wood ceiling, and a black reflector to obscure the view into the guts of the housing. We then decide it’s going to be flangeless and need to verify this manufacturer’s light will work and how much the thick ceiling will limit the adjustability. We then specify a collar to adapt to this thick ceiling. Depending on the manufacturer, the extension collar could be integral to the housing, or there may be an extended part of the trim.

If the client desires a dynamic lighting technology, we can kiss the narrow spot goodbye. If narrow spots are the driving factor, as they might be for someone with an extensive sculpture collection, so much for dynamic lighting. If the space is a home theater, we may want very low and smooth dimmability, so we will choose that appropriate driver. If a client is more focused on budget, we may go with a static color and basic driver that’s not fade-to-black.

It isn’t uncommon to specify 10 or 20 different types of recessed lights to adapt to varied conditions in a home.

Once we’ve survived the brain damage inflicted by specifying the downlights, we go through a similar checklist for different types of linear lights, steplights, in-floor uplights, light panels, monopoints, track systems, path lights and landscape bullets.

We finish up by layering controls information into the plans and issue a pricing set. When the pricing comes back, the client’s either okay with it…or not. If all is approved, we move into CDs, but if not, we guide the design through a VE process, attempting to keep the original intent as much as the budget will allow. Then, we issue CDs, and we have designed the perfect plan.

For residential projects, when CDs are issued, that’s when things really start changing. We spend the construction phase continuously adapting to new information from “others.” With each iteration, we’re trying to make Plan B appear as if it was Plan A.

The home is furnished, and the homeowners have moved in. Inevitably, we get the call that the kitchen feels dark or the bedroom reading lights are shining in the homeowner’s eyes. It’s time to finish.

We show up with our bag of tricks and work with the contractors to perform the final adjustments. In the glass houses we design today, our work hours resemble those of a vampire who moonlights with a day-job.

At the site, we find the spare optics we specified were thrown away by a laborer, and the electrician shows up, half-staffed and without the ladder we need to get 100% complete. We ascend scaffolding only to find the trims have been plastered into the ceiling, or screws which hold the ceiling in place are protruding into the aiming mechanism, prohibiting us from spinning our light in the required direction.

In today’s maddening world, even with mock-ups and meticulous planning, the color of light leaving a chandelier appears different than the color of light emitting from the coves. These are both different than the color of light leaving the table lamps, downlights, steplights and wall sconces.

After swimming upstream through all of these obstacles, we step back to view the finished product. Small wins are everywhere. The Picasso pops. The stone wall’s texture is elegantly revealed. The backlit shelves look sexy, and someone sitting in the library can read a book without feeling like an actor on stage.

For lighting designers, the project’s long days and nights fade as we share a glass of wine with the homeowner and celebrate the 99.9% of things we happened to get right….before waking up the next day and heading back to fight another battle with new knowledge gained the night before. ■