and what it means for lighting design
Which is great! Our decorative lighting isn’t fighting for visual dominance with a bunch of 4” holes in the ceiling. We can see the architectural finishes and focal points that we accent with lighting, not the lighting fixtures themselves.
But there’s a catch:
It’s not that diminutive LED luminaires are new, but previously a small fixture would have a small output. A 1-inch diameter accent light would have an output suitable for accenting a step or a niche. I’m now seeing that scale of fixture with enough output to do general architectural lighting in a space.
In my practice, I’m changing how I specify recessed downlights. I used to default to matte white trims on white ceilings to help fixtures blend in and soften the output. But with these tiny apertures, that trick doesn’t work the same way. The trim is already so small it doesn’t disappear any better in white, and diffusing the light can actually increase glare.
Now I’m specifying silver or black reflector finishes. That makes the fixture disappear into the ceiling when it’s on which is cool, but again we have to be careful about glare. The downside of the stealthy downlight is that when you do get under it to the point where you can see into the source, it tends to ramp up in brightness really really quickly. So it’s a good reminder that just because we can specify a 1000 lumen downlight with a 1/2” aperture doesn’t mean we should.
If we’re pushing the same amount of light through a 1-inch downlight as we previously did through a 4-inch aperture, that hole in the ceiling is now 16x brighter. Every manufacturer is bringing a 1-inch high-lumen downlight to market, but their approaches to balancing glare control and optical efficiency vary widely. This is where seeing product is so helpful, because they all look the same on the cutsheet.
I’ve also been specifying more linear fixtures with discrete optics, in loungier spaces like lobbies and library reading rooms. I like that it’s a form driven by the opportunities of the LED source itself, rather than an LED fixture that’s made to look like a flourescent linear.
I remain unconvinced by the super skinny linear fixtures because they have the same issue with more light through less area = more brightness, but they typically have a diffusing lens right at the bottom plane of the fixture which doesn’t offer any glare control at all.
It was nice to see manufacturers start to address this with fun and interesting louver designs.
Felt and paper and wood and post-recycled and 3D printed. The combination of low heat emission and minimal maintenance from LED allows for a lot of interesting possibilities. It’s a really fun time to be a lighting designer!
