Performance Decorative: The New Workplace Standard

Workspaces are evolving faster than ever, and architectural lighting is developing at a similar pace. However, one category of lighting used in corporate and workplace design has some catching up to do and that’s decorative lighting.

A variety of developments in the nature of the workplace have driven office design away from the bland, unchanging landscapes of the past. One example is choice-based seating, which essentially allows employees to find their own ideal work environment instead of being attached to a particular desk or workstation. Another is the highly competitive co-working space market: these short or long-term leased office environments are often loaded with shared amenities like informal work lounges and social areas.

Decorative lighting is a go-to design element to help create the look and feel of rooms like this, but often isn’t able to provide enough ambient light for more demanding visual tasks. Mixing a decorative luminaire with supporting “performance” lighting can work in some cases, but that approach inherently adds cost.

The humble phone room is another space type that has proliferated in choice-based seating environments. There are often dozens of these small single-occupant rooms per workplace floor, acting as quiet refuges for both calls and heads-down work. Here, decorative lighting can contribute to creating focus and reinforce a sense of privacy but may not have the best light output or distribution to support the full range of visual tasks that might be needed (for example, videoconferencing). Again, adding other layers of light in these spaces can solve the lighting problem but may be cost-prohibitive. How many fixtures is a client willing to pay for to light a 50-square-foot room?

What’s really needed for cases like these is a special category of decorative lighting: performance decorative. These are decorative fixtures with light outputs much closer to that of general lighting with shielded or diffused light sources to reduce glare and possibly other useful features, like acoustical absorption, separately controlled direct and indirect light, full-range dimming, and color-changing capabilities. In other words, these fixtures can’t just look great; they must be robust, adaptable, and help solve a variety of design problems.

In the co-working market, there’s a huge need for owner/operators to distinguish their product from the competition, and the product their selling is not just a furnished office space; it’s an experience. These environments often have very hospitality-like qualities, but they are still workspaces so lighting fixtures that are decorative but with performance features are often a necessity.

Tenants who are attracted to co-working are often drawn in by the networking and social possibilities. The coffee pantry in a space like this might transform into a bourbon-tasting bar every Wednesday at 6 PM. A warm-dimming capability in the decorative pendants above the island countertop would really help set the mood for this type of special event.

Decorative lighting used to just be what the name implies; it was decoration! It was often utilized as just the jewelry of interior space. There’s a great need, and therefore a great opportunity, for lighting manufacturers to step up to this new challenge: continue to give us beautiful lighting objects that support the aesthetic needs of our spaces, but also help us support the increasing functional needs of our clients by incorporating more performance features.