Hotel, restaurant and bar lighting design

What hospitality lighting design involves

A good restaurant scheme lights three things: the table, so the food looks as good as it tastes; the faces around it, so people look well and can read each other; and the architecture, so the room has depth without being bright. Everything else is held back. The same principle runs through a hotel lobby, a bar or a café: light the moments that matter, then let the rest of the room fall away.

Practically, that means narrow-beam sources aimed at tables from positions that avoid glare and shadowed faces, glow built into joinery and shelving rather than hung from the ceiling, wall washing to give the space scale, and a control system that moves the room through the day without anyone touching a dimmer.

Colour temperature, dimming and dim-to-warm

Hospitality is warm: 2700 to 3000 K is the working range, with 2200 K for the final evening scene where the brief allows. Dim-to-warm LED sources, which shift warmer as they dim, mimic what people expect from candlelight and incandescent lamps and avoid the grey, flat look of a cool source dimmed low. Colour rendering of CRI 90 or better keeps food, drinks and skin looking natural.

Day to evening: scenes and control

By day a café or restaurant leans on daylight and lifts the counter and product; at dusk the window and perimeter come up to compete with the street; late in the evening the levels drop to pools on the tables with a warmer colour. The control narrative writes those scenes down, sets the times and the fades, and gives staff a simple way to override them. DALI, 0–10 V or wireless control is chosen to suit the fit-out and the budget.

Coordinating decorative and architectural lighting

Interior designers often select the decorative pendants, wall lights and table lamps that give a venue its character. The architectural scheme is designed around them: providing the task and accent light the decorative pieces cannot, keeping their lamp colour and dimming behaviour consistent with the rest of the room, and making sure the pendant over the table does not become the brightest thing in the guest’s eye line.

Guest comfort, glare and daylight

Seated guests look across the room, not at the ceiling, so glare control is about low-angle sources: shielded downlights, honeycomb louvres on accent spots, and joinery-integrated light with the LED tape hidden from view. Daylight is treated as part of the scheme, with the counter and product lit to hold their own next to a bright window.

Part L, energy and emergency lighting in hospitality

Restaurants, bars and hotels are non-domestic buildings under Approved Document L, so luminaire efficacy and controls apply, and a LENI calculation to BS EN 15193 can demonstrate compliance for a scheme that relies on scenes and dimming. Emergency lighting to BS 5266-1 and BS EN 1838 is designed into the ceiling so that escape routes and open areas are covered without visible emergency bulkheads in the dining room.

Hospitality projects

At WatchHouse on Hampstead Heath, minimalist white track and spot lighting blends into the café’s light, natural interior for a clean, elegant and airy result, designed at 3000 K with targets of 300 to 600 lx and an installed load of around 10 W/m². The project card below carries the scheme’s design targets.