Aykon City Tower Block B & C

Walk the two towers from the lobby upward and you pass through a hotel, a restaurant, an office floor, a children’s room and a stack of serviced apartments. Each of those is a different lighting brief, written to a different standard, and on this building they are stacked on top of one another and served by the same risers.

That is the whole problem. A single-use tower has one answer repeated on every floor. A mixed-use tower has six that have to coexist. The parts they share are the parts nobody photographs: the riser, the ceiling void, the control system and the spares cupboard.

The temptation is to run one specification through the whole building because it is easier to buy and easier to document. It produces an office that feels like a hotel corridor, and a restaurant that feels like an office. Anyone standing in the room can see it, even if they cannot say why.

AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed the internal lighting for Towers B and C: the lobby, the restaurant and hospitality areas, the offices and meeting rooms, the amenity spaces and the residential interiors. The elevation was not in the scope.

The lobby is double height, which changes what the light has to do. In a normal-ceilinged room you light the floor and the walls take care of themselves. At this height the floor is a long way from the ceiling. A downlight-only scheme lands a bright pool on the marble and leaves everything above head height in gloom, which produces a room that is tall in plan and short in appearance.

So the work happens on the vertical surfaces. The reception desk is lit from behind through the stone, which makes the desk itself the brightest object in the room and gives arriving guests something to walk towards. The gold fins take grazing light along their length, and because they are vertical and repeated they carry the eye upward and tell you how tall the space actually is.

The floor is polished and heavily patterned, which is a constraint before it is a feature. A specular floor returns an image of every source above it. Beam angles and positions get set against the reflected view as well as the direct one. Get that wrong and the pattern in the marble competes with a second pattern made of reflected downlights.

The restaurant ceiling is densely planted, and that removes the surface a restaurant scheme would normally use. There is no plane to graze, no coffer to hide a source in and no clear run for a track. Anything recessed disappears into foliage. Anything surface-mounted competes with it.

The answer here is suspended and decorative. Crystal ring pendants hang below the planting at a fixed height, so they sit in clear air where they can be seen and where they can be reached. They read as the light source in every photograph of the room, which is what a restaurant wants: a visible warm object at eye level, not an invisible one overhead.

What the rings do not do is light the food. A decorative ring throws most of its output sideways and upward, and a table lit only from a ring is a table of shadowed plates. The fittings that put light on the tablecloth are small, tightly aimed and set to fall between the planting. They are the ones nobody notices.

That split — a decorative layer to be looked at and a functional layer to look by — is standard in hospitality. What is specific here is that the planting decides where the functional layer can physically go, so the two layers were set out together rather than one after the other.

The boardroom and the open workspace look like the same brief and are not. A boardroom is a room where people look at each other and at a screen; an open floor is a room where people look down at work.

In the boardroom the linear run sits inside the timber coffer. That puts a soft continuous line above the table and keeps the source out of the sightline of anyone sitting at it. The coffer also means the light has a surface to bounce from, so faces across the table are lit from above and from the timber rather than from a hard point source directly overhead.

The open workspace is set out to the ceiling grid, and this is where a mixed-use building bites. Full-height glass partitions can be moved — that is why they were specified — but the linear runs above them cannot. A run drawn to the grid works whatever the partitions do. A run drawn to today’s furniture goes wrong the first time the floor is reconfigured.

It costs something to work that way. Setting out to the grid means the odd desk sits slightly off-centre under its run, and the alternative is a ceiling that has to be rebuilt every time a tenant moves a wall.

The children’s gaming room is the most specific brief in the building. A wall of screens sets the rule, and the rule is the opposite of every other room here: the more light you put on a display, the less you can see on it.

Light reaches a screen two ways. It falls on the face of the display and washes the image out. It also appears in the glass as a reflection of whatever stands behind the viewer. So the fittings stay off the screen wall, the general level is kept low, and what light there is goes onto the desks and the floor where children need to see what they are doing.

The wall opposite the screens matters as much as the ceiling. Anything bright there will appear in every display in the room, which is why the mural wall carries no fittings of its own and is lit only by what spills onto it.

The far end of the room is treated differently again. It has a lit circular recess and a higher level, because it is the part of the room used for things other than screens. A room for children that is uniformly dim reads as unwelcoming, not restful.

The serviced apartments are where the arithmetic changes. A lobby is one room, and a one-off decision in it stays a one-off. An apartment type is drawn once and repeated on every floor that carries it. Every fitting in it is bought by the hundred, and so is every mistake.

The scheme is deliberately short. A perimeter cove carries the ambient level, a small number of downlights sit where people actually stand, and one decorative point hangs over the dining table. The downlights go over the kitchen run, the entrance and the seating. Adding a fitting to that list adds it to every unit of the type, along with its lamp, its driver and its share of the maintenance round.

The cove does most of the work because it is forgiving. It lights the ceiling, the ceiling lights the room, and the result survives furniture being moved, which downlights aimed at a sofa do not.

Colour temperature is held to one value across the whole unit, including inside the kitchen. Guests notice a warm living room running into a cold kitchen at once, even though almost nobody can name what is wrong. The two-tone apartment is the most common fault in serviced accommodation.