Zada Tower

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

A gym runs on a different clock from the flats above it. It has to be right at seven in the morning with sun coming through the glass, and at eleven at night with nothing behind it. Two 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. Downlights sit over the circulation route between the equipment, not over the equipment: anyone on a bench is looking straight up.

The mirror shapes the rest. Every fitting 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 plan reads as twice as busy once the mirror goes up.

It doubles the errors too. A downlight fifty millimetres off its line is invisible in the ceiling and obvious in the mirror, which puts it alongside its neighbours for comparison. Setting out mattered more here than specification.

The glazing opposite behaves as a second mirror after dark. By day it is the brightest surface in the room; at night it goes black and returns the room to itself. The same installation has to look right against both, which argues for a modest level and concealed sources.

AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed the lighting inside Zada Tower, in Business Bay, Dubai: the residents gym and the apartment interiors. The apartments are the other half of the commission. The one-bedroom repeats most often up the building and leaves a scheme the least margin.

A small open-plan living space cannot absorb a fitting in the wrong place. There is one position for a decorative pendant, over the seating, and it has to clear the balcony door swing and stay out of the line between sofa and television. Everything else is 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 little light outside pushes that boundary back and costs almost nothing.