Paramount Tower

AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed the internal lighting at Paramount Tower: the lobby and lounge, the hotel guest rooms and suites, and the serviced residences above them. The building is part of DAMAC Towers by Paramount Hotels & Resorts in Business Bay, and the elevation was not in the scope.

The brief carries a contradiction, and it is worth naming instead of smoothing over. A hotel branded on a film studio wants its public rooms to look like a set: high contrast, visible sources, deep shadow, drama you can photograph. The residences directly above want the opposite of all four. Nobody wants to live inside a set.

Both are correct. What makes it a design problem and not a matter of taste is that they are one lift ride apart, and a guest experiences them as one building.

The lounge is enclosed by a ring of tall glass rods, lit at the top so each one carries light down its length. They are not lighting an object in the room. They are the object, and they do the job a wall would otherwise do: they define a room within a room, and you can see through them.

That is an unusual thing to specify because it fails differently from ordinary lighting. A downlight that drifts in colour or dims unevenly is a minor fault. A ring of tall rods in which a few have drifted is immediately and obviously wrong, because the eye compares them against each other, not against a standard.

So the installation is treated as one batch, and spares come from the same batch and are stored on site. There is no way to buy a matching replacement in three years’ time; the only version that will match is the one bought at the beginning.

The chandelier behind them and the mural beside them are lit to sit back. If the rods, the chandelier and the artwork all compete at the same brightness the room becomes noise, so the rods lead and everything else is held below them.

The main stair is wrapped in a full-height curtain of hanging crystal, lit so the material catches light at every level. It is the most theatrical thing in the building, and it works because everything around it is restrained. The seating is lit low, the walls are lit low, and the stair is the brightest thing in view.

The difficulty is what happens next. A guest walks from that room into a lift and out onto a residential corridor, and the corridor cannot be theatrical. It has to show the floor, the door numbers and the keyhole, at a level someone can use at three in the morning without waking up properly.

The eye adapts upward in seconds and downward over several minutes, so the uncomfortable direction of travel is bright to dim. Coming out of a lit lounge into a dim corridor makes the corridor read as darker than it is, and slightly unsafe, even when the measured level is perfectly adequate. Handling that is a matter of not letting the contrast between the two spaces grow any larger than it needs to be.

A guest bedroom has to do more than a bedroom at home. Someone will work at the desk, read in bed, pack a case on the floor and find the bathroom in the dark, and the room has to support all of it without a lighting console.

The circular cove carries the ambient layer. It lights the ceiling and the ceiling lights the room, which produces a usable level with no visible source and therefore nothing to look into from a pillow. That last point is what separates a hotel bedroom from most other rooms. The ceiling is in view from the bed for hours, so anything bright and small up there is a fault, not a detail.

The bedside pendants are the reading layer, and they hang instead of standing on the table. That frees the surface and puts light at the right height for a book without lighting the other side of the bed. The desk is lit separately, because a desk lit only by the room is a desk you work on with your own shadow across it.

The suites work differently again. Where the bedroom opens directly off the living room there is no door to divide them. The two areas sit on separate circuits, and the boundary between sleeping and living is drawn in light instead of plaster.

The serviced residences use the quietest scheme in the building, and that is the point of them. A perimeter cove, a small number of downlights placed where people actually stand, and one decorative fitting held over the dining table.

The decorative point is worth being precise about. Over a table it works, because a table is a fixed thing at a known height and a pendant above it lights faces and food. Anywhere else in an open-plan room it becomes a bright object at head height in the middle of the floor, and it stops being a feature and starts being an obstruction.

The rest of the room stays away from the glass. A fitting close to a full-height window at night lights the glass, and a lit window seen from inside is a mirror. You lose the view the apartment was sold on and gain a reflection of your own ceiling. Keeping fittings back from the perimeter is what preserves the thing people are paying for.

One white runs through the whole residence, kitchen included. It is the cheapest decision on this page and the one that most reliably makes a fitted-out apartment look finished instead of assembled.

The building reads from a long way off. It has a lit crown, a lit vertical corner and bands of colour across the balcony lines, and from across Business Bay those are what identify it.

None of that was ours. The commission here was the inside of the building, and the elevation appears on this page only because it is how most people encounter the tower, not as a description of our work.

What is ours is visible in the same photograph once you know to look. The warm, even light coming out of the residential floors is the interior scheme seen from outside. Interior spill is the largest single thing most towers contribute to a skyline, and it is almost never designed on purpose.

The residences are not identical. The same short list of moves lands differently depending on what the interior designer has done with the surfaces, and two units on this page show the range.

A pale scheme returns most of what falls on it, so the cove alone carries the room and the downlights can be few and low. A dark scheme absorbs it, and the identical installation reads as under-lit. The fix is not more fittings but light placed where the eye is going anyway, which in a dining room means the table.

This is the argument for looking at a sample of the actual finishes before fixing quantities. A reflectance figure on a specification sheet and a slab of the real material under a real fitting are not the same information. It is the second one that decides how many downlights a room needs.