Dazzle Digest

This is Home Highlight’s own photograph. Warm points follow every ridge and turret, and the masonry below takes almost nothing. Because the roofline carries the glow, the walls do not need a second wash, and the driveway stays dark.

The company installs a colour-matched track that it says disappears into the roofline by day and is switched from a phone at night. The photograph shows why the warm setting is the one to keep: at blue hour it looks like the house, not a display.

This is Moonstruck Lighting’s own project photograph. The subject is not the house but the tree in front of it: warm uplights reveal the trunks and the lower canopy, and the stone facade reads as a backdrop rather than the main event.

Low path markers do their job and no more, and the entry is clear without the lawn being lit. It is the installers’ hierarchy again, rearranged around a tree.

If a house has a front door, so does a city, and in Toronto it is the Great Hall of Union Station. Domingo Gonzalez Associates, a New York lighting studio, says it has provided lighting design and consultation for the restoration of the hall since 2015, working with the City of Toronto and Parks Canada.

The studio’s brief, as it describes it, included evaluating the historic conditions and designing a family of custom chandeliers, through to the tender documents. The images it publishes are drawings rather than photographs, so that is what we show: a rendering of the hall, and a section through it.

Read this Kichler image as a diagram: it appears to be a rendering rather than a photograph. It shows the principle clearly. Low, aimed bollards put light on the walking surface, and the planting catches the edge of each pool.

The shadows are the point. A low source throws long shadows from plants and stones, which is what makes a garden look three-dimensional at night. Raise the fitting, or flood the bed, and the shadows shorten and the garden flattens.

The boardwalk at Canada Water, designed by Asif Khan, links the Tube station with the new development around the dock. After dark, warm white light built into the balustrade washes its red-stained timber and picks out its curving form.

The dock is a designated bat corridor, so Speirs Major worked with the site ecologist on seasonal timing. In winter, when the bats hibernate, the lights come on at a warm white 3000K in the evening for commuters, then shift over a few hours to warmer, dimmer light as the night goes on. A custom louvre on the balustrade lights controls how the light source reflects in the water.

Speirs Major wrote the lighting masterplan for the wider Elephant Park development and was then asked to light the park itself, as a social hub after dark. The approach shows in this photograph: the light is where people stop.

Benches either glow with integrated lighting or are picked out by individual ‘reading lights’, the studio says, to make comfortable places to sit and talk. Lit paths help people find their way, trees and foliage get carefully directed highlights, and the design aims for a balance of light and darkness.

The Tree House is a pavilion with a coffee shop, an event space and a public roof deck set around the upper branches of a tree. Washes of light on its vertical timber panelling turn it into a beacon as daylight fades, which also helps people find their way through the park.

Two decisions make it a model. No light source is directed upward, and the colour temperature is a warmer 2700K, chosen both for a relaxing mood and to limit the impact on wildlife and the ecosystem.

Salisbury Garden is designed so that its lawn becomes a serene place to take in the views of the Hong Kong Island skyline. The lawn sits on a halo of light around its edge, and the pedestrian areas are lit discreetly.

Away from the lawn, most of the garden’s light comes from vertical surfaces, which the studio says gives the sensation of being safely wrapped in light. The photograph shows the effect: people gather in the dark middle and look out.

The aim at Gasholders London was to give the structures a strong identity and reveal their industrial heritage, while thinking about the people who live inside them. Warm light is grazed up the front face of each column, using a custom detail with multiple lensed LEDs that keeps the light on the architecture and out of windows and the sky.

The project won an IALD Award of Excellence in 2019. The jury called it ‘an enticing concept realized absolutely into an enthralling reality’.

Much of the lighting at Exchange Square is low, to keep the space intimate and easy to meet people in. At the edges, columns at a human scale light the circulation; inside, low bollards reveal the routes and the planting.

The signature detail is in the steps. Slots cut into the terrazzo step seating and the water feature glow, and water flows over the light slots to make shifting patterns.

At Rathbone Square, the lighting responds to the time of day, the daylight available and the seasons of the planting. Light from the surrounding restaurants, flats and offices is treated as part of the composition, and the levels are balanced so that walking in from the street feels effortless.

The garden is both a destination and a passageway, the studio says, and the passages carry wayfinding details built into their ceramic tunnels.

Lights in Alingsås is a festival that draws more than 80,000 visitors a year to a small Swedish city to see temporary installations made by students under international lighting designers. Twenty years after the first one, Kai Piippo of Light Bureau and Torbjörn Eliasson of White Arkitekter, supporters since the start, came back to give the city something permanent.

With their colleagues Seren Dincel and Helena Johansson, they redesigned the area around the Lillå, the river through the town centre, to make it safer and more inviting. Polished steel poles along both banks carry the luminaires and reflect the trees and water, so the installation blends into its setting.

Local primary-school children added their own layer: lanterns made from painted milk bottles, hung above the river.

Like a real mountain, the planting at 1000 Trees is banded by altitude, and the changing leaf shapes meant each band needed a mix of uplighting and cross lighting from neighbouring planters. Doing that without glare into the many terraces and viewpoints took a full three-dimensional focus plot for the whole site.

The studio says it wanted the planters to act as individual pixels within the full external image.

Cascina Ranverso, in the lower Susa Valley, is one of the oldest agricultural buildings in Piedmont: it was built in 1782. Today it is an agritourism farm that follows biodynamic principles.

Grazing light brings out the restored farm’s materials, and the fixture list shows how consistent that choice is. Every luminaire listed on the project page is 2700K, many with honeycomb louvres to control glare and a colour rendering index customised to 90.

The Vittoriale degli Italiani is the hillside estate Gabriele d’Annunzio built at Gardone Riviera, on Lake Garda, in the 1920s and 1930s. A new section of exterior lighting, inaugurated in June 2017, lights its architecture and footpaths.

A linear profile built into the existing stone walls lights the walkway with a 3000K wash at ground level, and projectors pick out the undersides and profiles of the arches. The avenue through the olive trees is lit by fittings hidden beneath the benches, skimming the ground.