067
BUSINESS SAVVY
A policy shift during the planning stages of the new Crowne Plaza Doha required lighting designers Visual.energy to reproduce their proposed scheme using entirely solid state sources - all for the same budget.
The Crowne Plaza Doha is located in the heart of the Qatari capital’s banking dis- trict. Just two kilometres from Doha Inter- national Airport, it is part of the city’s new Business Park area and features 378 rooms, including 288 guest rooms and 90 one- and two-bedroom residential suites. Laurence Titton and his team at Visual. energy had just completed a comprehen- sive lighting design for the hotel when they received a change of brief from owners InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG). It was the end of 2009 and, as part of an initia- tive to reduce the environmental impact of hotels across its portfolio, IHG decreed that all new builds should adopt a 100% LED lighting policy. To accommodate this new directive, Visual. energy revisited their initial plans, sys- tematically going through each space and devising appropriate LED alternatives. In each case, the new solution had to follow the original scheme, with luminaires fol- lowing the existing configuration. Keen to
avoid a halfway-house solution, the client (the Qatari-based Arab Engineering Bureau) requested that no retrofit sources were adopted; without exception, luminaires had to be purpose designed for use with a solid state source.
Thankfully the new brief didn’t require a complete return to square one. With the aesthetic elements of the design already agreed, the transfer to LED became an en- tirely technical challenge. “The visuals from the client weren’t changing, the moods weren’t changing, none of the actual look of the building was changing,” explains Tit- ton. “The only change was that we had to find the equivalent LED fitting for literally every single technical light.
“Using all LED lighting at a time when LED was still expensive, and the budget had considered conventional fittings, was a challenge. We had to find the correct mix of quality, quantity and price of light fittings that would allow us to have a great look- ing product where design quality was not
compromised.”
Under the original plan, a typical guest room scheme comprised two MR16 down- lights above the entrance corridor and another above the luggage rack. These were substituted in the revised design by recessed square LED downlights with a 30º beam, developed through discussions with The Light Corporation. “This was back in 2009 and trying to push 900 lumens out of an LED and keep uniformity was a lot harder than it is today, but we did manage to achieve it,” says Titton.
Additional illumination was provided by two bedside lamps and a matching floor lamp (both with ribbed cotton diffuser), plus a desk lamp. Again, all used LED light sources. The new scheme still had to deliver the required 161 lux package, so an extra downlight was added above the desk area. Even with this addition, the overall power consumption was significantly reduced. Similar tweaks were carried out across the project. The Crowne Plaza follows a
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