Moonlight Design moved into a new office in 2020.
The team was looking forward to working in a new space, however, renovation and works were slowed down by the pandemic.
Our whole team has put their effort into creating a welcoming environment that would feel like a second home and we of course designed our own office lighting. We are all too familiar with the cold, flat lighting typical of new corporate offices and we decided to steer in the complete opposite direction.
The first step was to lay out the furniture and chose our colour palette so that the lighting could work along with and at the same time enhance the office. Light appears bright or dull depending on the surface it is illuminating, for example, a white desk will look a lot brighter than a dark wooden desk and the lighting levels need to be adjusted accordingly.
Natural daylight is very important for a working environment as it helps the employees’ mental wellbeing hence why all the of the desks were placed in the main room so that everyone would benefit from natural sunlight. However, direct sunlight can quickly become an issue when working on screens all day, due to the reflections, but also because of eye strain and not forgetting the heat.
We used a warmer white light than it’s generally used in offices to create a lovely welcoming atmosphere and workspace. We used wide beam track spotlights to minimise shadows and glare but that also allowed us to have the flexibility to install smaller fixtures to illuminate our gallery walls.
Our design team has worked on the lights’ layout differently for each room: the main open space room, the showroom, the print room/sub-office and the meeting room. Each room has a different function and it was important to reflect that with the lighting.
The main room is where all of our staff work, but it is also what people see from outside and is literally, our “shop window”, therefore we had to balance these two aspects, allowing for illumination on our gallery walls and the right lumen output on the working surfaces. We achieved this by having these two elements in different circuits of the track so that they could be controlled separately.
The lux levels on the surfaces are fundamental in an office as you have to consider the glare ratio on the screen, off the desks and directly from the light source. Super bright light doesn’t mean the employees will be more awake and work better but the opposite may become true as having excessive light output tires the eyes making it more difficult to focus on our tasks.
On the other hand, having a workspace that is too dark when looking at the screen will make it difficult for the eyes to adjust to the different brightness levels, having strong effects on our productivity.
Finally, once we were happy with the concept, we started adding little details such as a fun light element that we felt represented the company values and culture and to make it feel like our space.
An important part of this project was to allow the space to create different and challenging window designs for various occasions of the year. Our aim is to incorporate the design side of the company (The Art of Light by Moonlight Design) with the online sales (Moonlight Design). We have been having fun with being creative and especially during the pandemic we felt like we were bringing some light into the dark days.
We would love to design your lighting project and if you would like to discuss this further please contact us via the website, or email design@moonlightdesign.co.uk or 020 8925 8639.
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