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ALL AT SEA MBLD has teamed up with interior designers Richmond International to provide P&O's largest cruise liner to date with a seamless flow of scene-setting lighting installations. Laura Mackay, Associate, MBLD walks us through the process start to finish.
The Starburst - the concept of Richmond International, developed by Jona Hoad Design - is made up of 300 illuminated shards and 200 handfinished triangular facets, creating a spectacular centrepiece to the ship's atrium.
The Britannia P&O cruise liner began its journey in mid-2011 when the MBLD team joined interior designers Richmond International to change the face of cruise ship design. P&0 presented a brief which challenged us to develop a completely fresh and contemporary approach, which would, at the date of launching in March 2015, be introduced on Britain’s largest cruise ship. As well as a new aesthetic, energy consumption was at the top of P&O’s priorities. With this in mind, the use of LEDs to reduce energy connsumption compared with traditionally used halogen sources was, from the outset, a goal which we worked hard to achieve, given the added issues of vibration and unstable power when using LEDs on a ship. From the outset, we were required to meet targets for each of the public areas, in terms of loading and dimming circuits. Based on experiences from other ships' use of halogen downlights, we felt confident it could reduce the ships loading. By turning the ship into a fully LED lit scheme the energy consumption was reduced to a third or less of its normal running requirements. This, along with our approach to luxury
hospitality lighting - whereby lighting is selective and sensitive to each area - has seen significant improvements to the energy demand on the ship. While ship specification and stringent spaceby-space requirements provided benefits in some aspects, it took away from others in terms of the limited number of circuits allowed within each space. This meant that we had to work hard to achieve the balance of lighting within each space; a task that proved challenging in areas such as large scale restaurants or zones that consisted of mixed use spaces, yet shared limited circuitry. Working closely with the lighting manufacturers, we selected products and LED chips that ensured consistency in the quality of light and colour temperatures across the range of 130 lighting products installed. Public area lighting was supplied by Ensto Italia and Cabins by iVela, Italian manufacturers that have had many years experience working with the Italian shipyard Fincantieri. The aim was to develop a range of products that would allow the least amount of variations for difficulties faced