Hotel Designs Brit List HDBritList_eventGuide | Page 43

IN CONVERSATION WITH:
MORITZ WALDEMEYER
Following his personalised lighting installation at London
Design Festival last month, Moritz Waldemeyer speaks
to editor of Hotel Designs, Hamish Kilburn, about how
our industry can further push the boundaries of
LED lighting…
From lighting the backs of celebrities, such as will.i.am, to
creating jaw-dropping lighting installations around the globe,
Moritz Waldemeyer joins me ahead of the awards to offer an expert’s
opinion on what the future of lighting looks like.
Hamish Kilburn: Why is there such an
emphasis on lighting at the moment?
Moritz Waldemeyer: Lighting is the most
important element in creating an atmosphere,
a direct line to people’s emotional response
to a space and the single-most important
ingredient to the guest’s wellbeing.
HK: What major changes are you seeing in
hotel lighting?
MW: LED is king and has replaced all other
competitors. As an electronic component, it
happily plays along with sophisticated control
electronics for full automation, mood settings,
theatrical control and even animation. Despite
it being high in tech, the look is predominantly
conservative, retro, yet also sophisticated.
HK: Can personalised lighting really become
a reality?
MW: In theory the ingredients are all there;
networked light bulbs, controlled by apps, even
from across the globe. But sadly, there are
various incompatible systems, that are either
gimmicky or too complex. Nobody seems to
have hit that perfect balance yet.
HK: You are known for thinking ahead when
designing your installations. What do you
predict will be the next lighting trend?
MW: The topics I am really interested in are
to move away from static light to animated
light sources. If you think about fire being our
only artificial light source for thousands of
years, this is really imprinted into our brain.
Static light only came along little more than
100 years ago, but today’s LED technology
enables us to recreate the life in light and
allows us to re-awaken peoples’ emotional
response.
HK: What makes your installations unique?
MW: In the studio we are passionate, artistic
geeks; we are going much further than
anybody both in the artistic concept as in the
technical implementation. Every installation
is unique to the client or space and we love
to get into the depth of every technology we
use, right down to the layout of every single
track on our circuit boards and every line
of code on our processors. We believe that
attention to detail shows in the final result.
43