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Top Juicy Couture, Regent Street, London - as featured in mondo*arc 70 (Pic: Nick Guttridge); Colbert, Sloane Square, London (Pic: David Loftus); Superdry, Regent Street, London (Pic: Supergroup & Precision Lighting) Above DKNY, Bond Street, London (Pic: Chris Gascoigne); Red or Dead 30 Year Anniversary Exhibition, Old Truman Brewery, London (Pic: Red or Dead)
Just under two years ago Paul Nulty founded his lighting design practice Paul Nulty Light- ing Design (PNLD), based in London. Nulty and his team have a wealth of knowledge and practical expertise in providing the right lighting solutions for their clients, working in close collaboration with archi- tects and designers providing creative and innovative lighting design consultancy. PNLD has appeared on seven awards shortlists in those two years, so it seemed a good time to ask Nulty about what he’s been up to and what does ‘quality of light’ really mean to him? The designer was straight to the point. “Quality of light is about people and their perception, it isn’t about ticking the boxes, it isn’t really about whether it’s 1 or 2 McAdam ellipses, or CRI 95, or luminous intensity. It’s about how people relate to a space and the way a space is illuminated. If it works and people like it, then it’s the
right quality of light. It’s trying somehow to find a solution that fits. It’s also a rela- tive term, you need darkness to create contrast with the light, tonal and textural differences. You can’t have light without having space. You try and light a space for people and in order to aid that relationship between space and people you use pigeon holes, like CRI or intensity, and we use those criteria as a guide to light the spaces. As a manufacturer you might look at lots of factors like lumen output, efficacy, spectral output, colour rendering, colour consistency over lifetime, longevity, ease of installa- tion. But for a designer that’s not quality of light, that’s quality of product or service and it’s that difference that causes so many manufacturers who also offer ‘lighting design services’ to get it so wrong. Quality of light to me is lighting people and spaces to achieve a high quality of environment.
Everything else is just a means to an end.” The tipping point question for disrup- tive technologies like LED is when do they become good enough to be the technology of choice. In reality specifiers have to take into account so many different factors. Nulty says, “It’s not just quality of light – it’s quality of light relative to other ex- ternal factors such as capital expenditure. If you ask ‘is it okay to have low quality of light’ the answer is no, if the question is ‘is it okay to spend less money and have lower quality of light’, depending on the client brief the answer could be yes, if it’s good enough then it’s good enough.” At the project level, there are many other factors to deal with like buildability, maintainability, customer service, cost. The question on what is quality of light is a dif- ficult question to answer actually, as it’s so subjective.
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