Hotel Lighting Suite

Guest Room & Hospitality Market

This was a live project carried out for Chesterfield based company Northern Lights who create lighting for the guest room and hospitality markets, as well as offering a selection of standard lighting suites and carrying out bespoke lighting projects.

Research

The first key research phase involved taking a first-hand look at hotel rooms of varying budgets and markets. Around 8 hotels were visited around Sheffield including Travel Lodge, Hilton, Ibis and the Sheffield Metropolitan Hotel. Photos were taken for reference during analysis which unfortunately cannot be shown here due to privacy agreements.

It was decided to design this lighting suite for a premium market.

Lighting technologies were researched along with trends to better inform the design process.

Initial Stages of Development

A range of concepts were sketched out that were based around certain lighting technologies such as OLEDs and LEDs.

It was important to quickly move on to physical modelling with physical light sources in order to get a sense of how these objects acted as lights. Of course, the designs had to be considered from two different perspectives - when illuminated and when off.

Manufacture and Stakeholders

A key part of this project was the ability to create these lights in house. A tour of Northern Light's in-house facilities prompted a slight change in technical direction, making the design more appropriate for their manufacturing set up. This included sheet metal work in the form of spinning and plasma cutting, spraying, CNC machining, low-cost extrusions and welding. An extensive range of stock components also informed the process. Such materials ranged from acrylic tubing to brass sheets.

Many stakeholders had to be considered including assembly lines, maintenance, the hotels themselves (branding and cost), transportation and the users.

Visualisations

Towards the end of the project, renders were placed into real world imagery to give some appealing context to the designs.

Solidworks models were rendered in KeyShot and backdrop images were used when needed. The renders were then edited in Photoshop to create the impression of illumination by blending various layers together and editing the hues.