“Insights into Lighting for Listed Houses”, a new article in Listed Heritage
We wrote our first article for Listed Heritage, the magazine for the Listed Property Owners Club, over five years ago. We’ve just written an updated and revised piece for the September/October edition. “Insights into Lighting for Listed Houses” is illustrated with projects we’ve worked on
The fundamentals of lighting design remain the same. The added complication comes from understanding how to work with and respect the elements that make the building significant. That means minimising cabling, minimising impact on significant features of the building and designing with a view to making the design reversible. Projects may also have additional stakeholders. Getting early feedback and agreement is more important than ever.
Listed buildings are rarely dull. They make for great projects but they also tend to throw up additional challenges. Lighting high ceilings, lighting low ceilings, lighting areas where running cables is discouraged, difficult or prohibitively expensive. Planning early is even more critical. Projects are all very different but our work on listed buildings has involved a lot of early concept and design work well ahead of any cables being run. The cable routing for the featured Hampshire barn project avoids the roof structure. Much of the ambient light actually comes from ground recessed floor lighting.
The article also discusses the role of technology. Technical developments have opened up new ways of tacking the challenges in lighting listed buildings. LED output has improved dramatically and the highest quality fittings deliver excellent colour rendering, richness and warmth. This combination allows us to light these glorious old buildings with discretely located fittings in easily accessible and maintainable locations.
Lighting listed buildings is an important element of our design service. To read more about what we do and projects we’ve worked on, have a look at the Lighting Listed Buildings section of this site.
