FEATURE
ABOVE LEFT TO RIGHT: Simon Baldwin – Development Director, The Scarlet; David Bennett - Hotel Verta David Bennett Architects; James Dilley – Associate Director, Jestico + Whiles
Sally Storey said luxury hotel brands
were “terrified” of the results of new technology such as LEDs, because of previous experiences with poor quality products. “Our job as lighting designers is to introduce them to new technology and persuade them to change their guidelines.” At the budget end of the hotel spectrum, the issue of procurement was also raised, by Dexter Moren, who questioned the level to which architects and designers could impact on the interior lighting specification of budget hotels: “Most budget hotels have a standard product and as an architect you’re designing a box in which that standard product goes. Many buildings are procured on a design-and-build basis, so unless you’ve specified a particular supplier from day one and have a client who’s been able to say at some point, “I must have that”, it will be a generalised specification, and the contractor will decide what’s the cheapest he can get for that price.” According to Rowena Preiss, “Our
involvement in the budget hotel arena is generally with the buyers and the financial side of their business, where they’re looking at cost saving strategies and payback models. Their absolute agenda is to conserve energy and achieve a good payback period.”
The discussion moved onto exterior lighting, and building façades, which James Dilley said were increasingly important: “All the projects we’ve done in the last five or so years have had an element of interaction and mood to the external facade.”
He cited the example of a hotel where “the corridors are expressed on the building, so at night-time movement detectors set the lights off in the corridors, the light comes up and then it gradually softens down. The interaction of people moving in the corridors becomes the architecture. The lighting can actually be integrated from the beginning as part of the the architecture, so it almost becomes the architecture. It doesn’t have to be something which is post applied.” Dexter Moren agreed, citing the new InterContinental hotel under construction in St James in London: “It’s a conversion of an existing building, where we’ve had to cut into the area of the building previously occupied by retail outlets. We’ve managed to persuade the local authority to let this incision into the fabric of the building be a design feature, a kind of light box with slumped moulded glass allowing daylight through. You can use lighting in that sense, in the exterior of the building.”
132 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2010 WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM
Another architect, Ian Springford of ISA put it thus: “We’re talking about systems to solve problems rather than actually getting rid of those systems in the first place. We should be looking at whether we can cut the amount of systems we’re putting in, can we get back to more natural ventilators? We should be working with lighting designers and lighting manufacturers to say how do we actually use less of your stuff rather than more and more sophisticated technical solutions to solve these problems. We’re trying to get that debate to move on rather than just saying can we get more and more efficient light bulbs, it’s a case of can we get rid of these light bulbs in the first place?” Rowena Preiss concluded saying: “Philips are here to provide solutions, whether that’s for a bathroom mirror lighting treatment, an underground car park, or an outdoor multimedia façade scheme. We’re really here to support the design community and hopefully with events like today’s, to get some feedback to understand where the challenges are and where we need to refocus our attention, so that we can support the design community in an even better way.”
Video highlights of this roundtable can be viewed at
www.sleepermagazine.com
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