Zada Tower

The residents gym runs along one side of the amenity floor with a full mirror wall down one long side and full-height glazing down the other. That arrangement is standard in the UAE and it makes the room considerably harder to light than its size suggests.

A gym also runs on a different clock from the flats above it. It is used before work and late at night. So it has to be right at seven in the morning with the sun coming through the glass, and at eleven at night with nothing behind it. Those are two different rooms sharing one ceiling.

The scheme keeps the sources out of the way and lets surfaces do the work. A perimeter cove lifts the ceiling and gives an ambient level with nothing to stare into, and the downlights sit over the circulation route between the equipment, not over the equipment itself. Anyone lying on a bench is looking straight up, and a downlight directly above that position is the one thing guaranteed to be complained about.

The mirror is the constraint that shapes the rest. Every fitting in the room appears twice, once in the ceiling and once in the glass, and the reflected copy is as bright as the original. A ceiling that looks sensible on a reflected-ceiling plan can read as twice as busy once the mirror goes up.

It also doubles the errors. A downlight fifty millimetres off its setting-out line is invisible in the ceiling and obvious in the mirror, because the reflection puts it directly alongside its neighbours for comparison. On this job the setting out was worth more attention than the specification.

The glazing opposite behaves as a second mirror after dark. During the day it is the brightest surface in the room and everything reads against it; at night it goes black and returns the room to itself. So the same installation has to look right against a bright background and against a dark one, which is the argument for keeping the level modest and the sources concealed instead of chasing a number.

The apartments are the other half of the commission. The one-bedroom is the type that repeats most often up the building, and it is the one where a lighting scheme has the least margin.

A small open-plan living space cannot absorb a fitting that is in the wrong place. There is one obvious position for a decorative pendant, over the seating, and it has to clear the balcony door swing and stay out of the line between the sofa and the television. Everything else is a short list of downlights over the kitchen run and the entrance.

The balcony threshold does more work than it looks. A dark balcony beyond a lit room turns the glazing into a mirror and makes a small flat feel smaller, because the edge of the room becomes the glass instead of the rail. A modest amount of light outside pushes that boundary back out and costs almost nothing.

AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed the lighting inside Zada Tower: the residents gym and the apartment interiors, in Business Bay, Dubai.

Our project record for this tower lists internal and external lighting, and the project document describes the internal package only. We are not going to resolve that disagreement in your favour or ours. The honest position is that the only images we hold of this building from the outside are architectural visualisations of an unbuilt scheme. So nothing on this page describes its elevation, and no claim is made about it.

The same applies to the lobby and the common areas, which are listed in the project document but which we cannot show built. A page that described them from a drawing would be a rendering of an intention, and everything else on this site is a photograph of a result.