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the World Of Hospitality
Have we now found the ‘holy grail
of lighting’? The prize has been in
our grasp and eluded us in the past.
The obstacle has been overcome.
On this journey, we achieved energy efficiency
never hoped for in the past; lamps that hardly
need any maintenance.
But did we lose something on the way? LED lost
intimacy and that warm feeling of comfort.
The first step in the right direction was for coves
and shadow gaps that had 2 linear lines of LED;
enabling us to dim both lines independently with
two color temperatures of white. Colour 2700k
was pretty much the equivalent of tungsten
halogen when on full brightness, but when the
good old light bulb or low voltage down-lighter
dimmed, it had something else! It warmed as it
dimmed to the color of a candle at its lowest.
Oh, how we missed this! To quote Joni Mitchell;
“You don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone”.
The feeling when you come in from the cold to
your local bar or restaurant you seek refuge and
comfort. This is because we are wired that way.
The human condition expects the evening to
have warmer tones. Sunlight does this, and the
restaurant hospitality experience is nothing short of
returning to our cave with a warm fire to greet you.
Of course, the first step in getting hospitality
lighting right is to hire a lighting designer such as
Lighting Force, who specialise hospitality lighting
design. They know where it should go and what
it should be. They have all the latest toys at their
disposal, like the Inox Dim2warm downlighter;
‘Mood’ that does all that I have described. Its only
taken 2 decades to get this treasured feature back!
Using latest LED technology at 100%; a mighty
1000 lumen output suitable for front of house
circulation areas. But here is the clever bit. At 50%
dimmed you are in the area of tungsten, and at 7580% dimmed you are at candle flame color tones.
As I said; the ‘holy grail’. That in conjunc tion with
similar effects from Inox cove lighting systems
creates a complete hospitality package.
Ian Howard - Hospitality Lighting Specialist
lighting force
Dim to Warm
The past few years have seen great advances in
lighting technology in the hospitality industry.
New LED lightsources have largely supplanted the mix of incandescent and compact fluorescent
lamps that became the norm over the past couple of decades. These have massively reduced energy
and maintenance costs, whilst adding to the designer’s pallet of techniques to make a space stand
out by use of tiny lightsources in inaccessible spaces and new ways to use coloured light.
Few would miss the compact fluorescent lamps when they are gone, but incandescent lamps
had desirable characteristics that we are missing already. This is why CFL lamps never took off
in hotels the way they did in offices (or at least, not in classy hotels) - the poor light quality and
lack of controllability largely consigned them to lobbies, corridors and back of house areas only.
Upgrading to LED lightsources solves many of the problems with CFLs, but up until now they
have had one glaring fault that has left them at a disadvantage to incandescent.
Both consciously and subconsciously, humans associate colour temperature and intensity of light
with the time of day - we associate cooler light with daytime and warmer light with evenings.
Lighting designers have known this for many years and have come up with varying techniques to
create light, business-like daytime scenes and warm, intimate evening scenes in the same space.
In the age of incandescent and halogen lamps, this was easily achieved simply by dimming the
lamps - anyone with lights at home on a dimmer switch will know that dimming them down
in the evening doesn’t only reduce the light, but warms the colour as well. This is a natural
characteristic of any filament lamp, but not of any gas discharge (fluorescent) or solid state (LED)
lightsource. It also happily fits in with our subconscious desire for warmer evening light.
LED lighting has provided some great tools for the designer to tone the light to suit the time of
day, by mixing light from cool coloured and warm coloured lamps and using controls to vary
the mix between the two. These are great solutions for open spaces and corridors as they tend to
be from linear led lamps that can be concealed in coffers and shadow gaps. But concealed linear
lighting doesn’t suit all spaces and, in itself, tends away from intimacy as it flattens light in a space.
For a truly intimate space, directional light, such as produced by downlights and spotlights is best.
And here’s the rub - until now, LED lamps in these types of light fitting have not had the ability
to warm in colour as they dim. With the introduction of the ‘Mood’ range, Inox now offer the
solution to this - a range of downlights with all of the conventional LED benefits, but also with
the characteristic that as they are dimmed, the colour warms up, just like incandescent lamps.
‘Mood’ downlights were developed with the hospitality industry in mind, so at the cool end are a
still warm 3000K, typical of an undimmed filament lamp and at the warm end are down at 2000K
- the colour temperature of candle-light. At full output, they deliver up to a punchy 1000lm at
only 14 watts of power. These benefits have led some to describe ‘Mood’ as the ‘holy grail’ of
hospitality lighting.