Lounge lighting in the home of designer Janine Stone

When she was overseeing the decoration of the bedroom in her New York home, Louise Carnegie, wife of 19th-century industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie, could hardly have imagined that one day it would be covered with an unusual form of wallpaper – one on which the twinkle of a thousand stars would be evoked by light-emitting diodes.

The LED wallpaper was part of a transformation of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum – housed in the Carnegie Mansion – brought about last year by lighting designer Ingo Maurer. The installation provided striking evidence of the way new interior illumination effects are being deployed in homes.

The change is being brought about not only at the hands of artists such as Maurer. Interior designers are experimenting with all kinds of lighting to generate a wide range of effects that would have been impossible using traditional incandescent bulbs and halogen lamps.

New York-based designer Michael Gabellini, for example, uses LED lights, fluorescents and HID (high-intensity discharge) lights to transform his spaces. In a Chelsea loft recently completed by Gabellini Sheppard Associates, many of these technologies have become space-defining tools. In the large, open bedroom, for example, HID downlights are used to create dramatic accents and spotlighting while ceiling beams are washed with LEDs, creating ambient veils of light across the space. And Gabellini is looking forward to future innovations. “From a lighting perspective we are going to see amazing things being developed,” he says.

However, while designers such as Gabellini have long embraced the new technology and are using it to powerful effect, the changes are not being taken on entirely voluntarily. New environmental legislation – aimed at cutting the energy consumption and carbon emissions generated by lighting – is being rolled out across Europe and in some US states, setting requirements for “lumen efficacy”, the term used to measure the amount of light given off by a particular light source relative to the amount of energy consumed.

“In new houses in the UK now, 25 per cent of any lighting must be 40 lumen efficacy,” says Lucy Martin, design director at John Cullen Lighting, a London-based lighting supplier and designer. “So if you’re doing wiring from scratch or refurbishing your sitting room or building a conservatory and you’re installing electrics, you have to build in 25 per cent of energy-efficient lighting.”

A staircase designed by John Cullen Lighting

Already, incandescent bulbs are disappearing from store shelves. In the UK it is now hard to find 75-watt and 100-watt bulbs and from this year 60-watt bulbs will also be phased out, until all incandescent lighting is eliminated by 2012 in line with European Commission regulations.

For interior designers the new regulations have far-reaching implications, particularly as most agree that the means through which a home is lit is one of the most important ways of shaping its style and atmosphere.

“A project lives and dies on lighting,” says Anthony Bevacqua, an interior designer at Janine Stone Interior & Architectural Design, which has offices in the UK and Russia. “You can have the most fantastic design, furnishings, colours and fabrics but they can be murdered by bad lighting.”

Martin sees the changes as nothing short of revolutionary. “Doing away with standard bulbs is like doing away with the toothbrush and someone telling you that you now have to clean your teeth with a new whizzy gadget,” he says. “It’s radical and quite difficult for people to get their heads around.”

Moreover, with much of the technology still very new, energy efficiency requirements are pushing up costs, particularly when it comes to the sophisticated management systems needed to control lights and their dimming functions.

While alternative lights and fittings are emerging with regularity, there is still room for improvement in the quality and stability of the light emitted by many of the new sources. “Most LEDs are grey-white and not very consistent,” says Martin. “So if you had seven uplighters on a wall you could guarantee that one would not be the same output or colour as the others.”

However, while the shock of the new is still resounding in many quarters, forward-looking interior designers are starting to recognise the advantages new technology brings to residential lighting.

Some early versions of energy-efficient sources, such as compact fluorescent and HID, have given way to fittings with better colour and tone. And improved LEDs now give out a warmer light with more yellow, making them viable substitutes for tungsten and halogen. A process called “binning” has also improved the stability of brightness and colour for LEDs.

Martin has noticed the difference. She cites the experience of fitting out a house in Barnes, south-west London, a project that John Cullen Lighting recently completed for clients who wanted to achieve 75 per cent energy efficient throughout the interior. “It was interesting to see that there’s a toolbox of fittings available that aren’t hideous and that allow you to design a great lighting scheme,” she says. “You can still lower the lighting and do accents and detail lighting – they do all the same things.”

For Bevacqua, the fact that there are now alternatives to the halogen fittings that have long lit corridors and highlighted artworks comes as welcome news. “We were always irritated by the rainbow effect that you get on the corners [with halogens],” he says. “If you had a corridor with 20 downlights focusing on the paintings on the walls, you’d get this scalloping effect. The LEDs have filters added, which means you get a much smoother wash.”

This also makes it easier for designers to balance downlights with low-level lamps, something that is important when achieving an effect in more traditional-looking homes and historic and listed interiors.

The challenge here is finding opportunities to install lighting in grade-listed interiors where architects are not allowed to interfere with the fabric of the building. In a residential project in Kent, south-east England, for example, designers at Janine Stone are dropping cornices by about five centimetres and putting light fittings inside them, allowing light to wash smoothly across the ceiling.

“It’s about finding clever ways of concealing things in stuff that’s applied, rather than messing around with the fabric of the building,” says Bevacqua.

LED wallpaper by Ingo Maurer at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York

Here, the advantage of LED lights – in both traditional and contemporary homes – is that they are tiny and flexible. And the fact that LEDs generate very little heat means they can be installed in places in which incandescent bulbs would create a fire hazard. Used as decorative lamps, they do not need to be encased in fire retardant and synthetic materials.

“You don’t get those horrible dark stains around light fittings,” says Bevacqua. “And the fittings are smaller so you can incorporate them into detailing or cabinetry and joinery.”

But while Bevacqua and others are relishing the new flexibility of LEDs, Gabellini is even creating dramatic effects with a more traditional energy-efficient light source – one that many would once have turned their noses up at: the fluorescent strip. “For us it provides a spatial component to light and it’s through fluorescent light that we can most closely simulate natural daylight conditions,” he explains.

“If you think of the basic kelvin scale of temperatures, it ranges from that cool, cold light when you open a fridge, which is about 5,000 kelvin, to very warm fluorescent, which is 1,800-2,000 kelvin,” says Gabellini. “So with fluorescent you still have a whole spectrum of warmer or cooler light that you can mix to create different effects. And you get a veiling or layering of light within a space, so it gives it a sculptural quality.”

Where the new lights really come into their own is in highly contemporary interiors where clients are looking for a dramatic, almost theatrical effect. New technology allows designers to play with quality and brightness in an almost infinite variety of combinations of pinpoints of light, abstract shapes and stripes.

For a residential project in Chelsea, central London, Janine Stone was asked to create a space in which to hold parties and where the backdrop would conjure up the feeling of the opening credits of a Bond movie, with guests silhouetted against a backdrop of light.

To achieve the effect the firm created a 15-metre glass wall with very small fibre-optic lights embedded in it – a feature that would have been far harder to achieve without the advent of new technology. “We made a 15-metre long light box that could change colour and create fantastic effects,” explains Bevacqua. “You couldn’t have done that before.”

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Details

www.gabelliniassociates.com
www.janinestone.com
www.johncullenlighting.co.uk