Al Weam and Al Aman Cars Showroom

AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed the lighting throughout this building: the display floor, the testing bays, the reception and lounge, the circulation between them, and the signage on the outside. The interesting part of the commission was that it had to serve two businesses that disagree about what light is for.

ALWEAM sells used cars. AMAN inspects them. Selling a car means showing it at its best, which is what showroom lighting has always been for. Inspecting one means finding what is wrong with it, and light that flatters is light that hides the thing an inspector is being paid to notice.

Those two requirements sit about twenty metres apart, with glazing between them, so neither could be tuned on its own. Stand in the showroom and you can see into the workshop; stand under a lift and the showroom is behind you. The scheme had to let both look deliberate from the other side.

The hexagonal grid over the testing bays reads as a styling choice and is not one. Its job is to put light onto a vehicle from several directions at once.

A car on a four-post lift blocks the ceiling directly above the work. Anything arriving from one direction leaves the underside in shadow, which is precisely where an inspection happens. A grid of continuous lines running in three directions solves that by geometry: what the vehicle hides from one line, another line reaches from a different angle. The shape follows the problem, and the fact that it also looks like something is a bonus the client gets for free.

Colour temperature is cool and held constant across the bays. An inspection is a judgement about condition, and warm light softens exactly the things a technician is looking for. Colour rendering earns its place here for a different reason than in a shop. It is not there to make a finish attractive, but to let somebody tell one fluid from another and read the true colour of a stain on a driveway tray.

A new-car showroom can light a vehicle purely to make it desirable, because every car on the floor is identical and perfect. A used-car floor cannot. Every vehicle has a history, and the customer is looking for it.

That sets a limit nobody writes into a brief. The lighting has to be good enough to sell a car and honest enough that the buyer finds nothing outside in daylight that the showroom concealed. A scheme that hides a swirl mark in the paint sells one car and loses the next one, along with the review. So the floor runs on high colour rendering and even coverage, with the drama kept to the ceiling and the walls where it costs nothing.

The large screen behind the cars is a light source the scheme has to live with. It throws colour onto whatever is parked in front of it and changes brightness every few seconds. The ambient level is set high enough that the screen reads as a screen and not as the room’s lighting.

The customer side is the one place the building is allowed to be warm. Reception, the cafe counter and the lounge carry lit coves, a backlit brand mark and profiles set into the wall panels, at a level that makes sitting down for twenty minutes comfortable.

The angular white profiles are the building’s signature, and they are the most difficult thing on the job to build.

A run that changes direction is a series of mitres, and every one of them either lines up or announces itself from across the room. A run that changes plane is harder still. Wall and ceiling are built by different trades working to different tolerances, and the joint between them is exactly where these lines cross. The only way through is to set the whole run out from one datum instead of from each surface it touches, and to agree that datum before either trade starts.

The polished brass beside the profiles doubles the difficulty. Every line is reflected in it, so a joint that is two millimetres out appears twice and reads as four. It is also why the fittings had to be a matched batch: a slight colour difference between two lengths is invisible on a wall and obvious in a mirror next to it.

Mounting heights in a workshop are set by the vehicle and not by the ceiling. A car on a four-post lift rises to roughly chest height, and a raised bonnet goes higher still, so a fitting that comfortably clears a standing person may not clear the thing being worked on. The grid is set out to the bays rather than to the room, which is why it does not line up with the walls.

Ingress and impact ratings are chosen for a workshop, not an office. Brake dust, tyre rubber and aerosol overspray all end up on a diffuser, and the floor gets pressure washed.

Cleaning matters more than replacement here, and it is the part that gets left out of a maintenance contract. A diffuser in a testing bay loses more output to a film of dust and rubber in a year than the LED behind it loses to age in five. The schedule that keeps this scheme performing is a cleaning schedule with a lamp change occasionally attached to it.

Access is the other half of the same problem. A grid above a lift can only be reached when the bay is empty, so any work on it is booked against the workshop’s diary rather than the maintenance contractor’s convenience. That is worth agreeing at handover, while somebody still has the drawings open.