Crack English duo take on Hotel Georgia lighting

Tag: Lighting Arrester

There has been an endless stream of new developments downtown the last few years, but few are as ambitious as the Hotel Georgia project.

The $400-million development is a blend of a 1927 heritage building and a contemporary tower. It's also a blend of a boutique hotel and high-end condos. And it's very high-end: the 7,400 sq. ft. penthouse in the condo tower has already sold for $18 million.

Sally Storey and Chris Lewis have a key role in making the two buildings work. The duo have been brought in from London to design the lighting for the project.

That's right, the lighting.

Big projects like this often employ lighting designers to bring a little extra je ne sais quoi to the development. In lighting circles, Storey and Lewis are as good as it gets, particularly regarding heritage buildings.

Their company, Lighting Design International, has worked on all sorts of historic buildings, such as the Hotel Des Bergues in Geneva (built in 1834), the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Athens (built in 1874), and the Temple Church in London, a 12th-century structure that was featured in The Da Vinci Code.

Storey is also a noted author in Britain, thanks to her 2002 book Lighting By Design (Pavilion). She has another book coming out this fall called Perfect Lighting.

"Lighting is important to transform any space, any mood," says Storey.

"You can have a white box and make it sing with lighting. It changes your mood. You go into any bar or any restaurant, and you either feel good or bad there. It may be beautifully decorated, but usually it's the lighting that gives you that comfortable feeling or not."

The Hotel Georgia is a challenging project, which is one of the things Storey likes about it.

"It's an unusual challenge, because you've got the historical side and the contemporary side together," says Storey, who was trained as an architect but has specialized in lighting since the early 1980s.

"They stand cheek-by-jowl and they both have their own style and design. It's much more fun, doing both at the same time."

On the heritage building, Storey will use modern lighting techniques to play up the architecture, rather than simply do a period restoration with period lighting.

"What I want to do is highlight the architecture so that it comes into its own, and keep the general lighting to a dimmer level so it just gives ambient lighting," she says.

"In the past people were worried about getting recessed uplighters to do things, because it's a contemporary [light] source. But I feel that you want to celebrate the old architecture, make it come alive in a contemporary way."

"Uplighting" is when you point a light up; "downlighting" is the reverse. In a heritage structure like the Georgia, this might mean placing small lights at the bottom of a grooved column so that they illuminate the grooves -- an architectural feature regular lighting usually ignores.

Subtle placement of miniature lights can also bring a fresh look to an antique chandelier. In the old days, you would just hang the chandelier in a lobby or ballroom and it would light the room. A modern trick is to dim the chandelier so the light is less glaring, then adding uplights and downlights which make it appear the light is coming from the chandelier.