Summary

- To excite and to astonish the customer
- A personality in light
- Taking care of lights means more customers
- Niches, colours and projections: the most innovative lighting solutions
- Light as an investment
- Rigorously in darkness
- Artemide's technical suggestions to create the perfect lighting

To excite and to astonish the customer
It is a great mistake to think that a lighting system is just useful to light up a space. Light today is a key element to create ambience, style and atmosphere, and to give bars and restaurants the right configuration. Either fluo or diffuse, opaque or shining, in fact, lights work more than furniture in giving a public concern its mood and spirit.
The latest trends can be summed up in one trend: the complete lack of a trend. The only peremptory commandment is to surprise. Today, neither the humblest bar can be content with an ordinary lamp laid on the counter. Even the humblest lamp, in fact, has a role in defining the place it belongs: ethnic, high tech, trendy, etc. At Triennale's Coffee Design in Milan, for example, light comes form lampshades made by three bent forks which hold a methacrylic sheet that works as a diffuser: an apparently simple solution that hides the precise will to underline the gastronomic and stylish mood of the locale.
But there are many other examples of cafes that have turned light into a playful element, celebrating a marriage between light and colour, also thanks to the most advanced technology.
C Dream is a Costa Crociere café recently opened in Genoa. It is a cross between a lounge bar and a chamber of technological and multimedia wonders: customers, with their movements, activate them all around, creating always changing plays of light. The lighting is provided by coloured leds with more than 16 millions shades and it is controlled from a computerized console.

A personality in light
And there is also who based a café's personality itself on lights and colours. At People's, a chromobar in Milan, the customer drinks a cocktail while he finds again the perfect equilibrium between body and mind, thanks to the millions colours and light waves projected on the walls - or at least this is what People's owners assure.
Apart from new age oriented promises, also hotels count more and more on luminous and coloured flashes. For the Saint Martin's Lane 45 in London, for example, Philippe Starck has projected spotless rooms, so the customer can choose himself the colour by simply pushing a button.
Talking about materials, models and installations, the choice is almost infinite. From classic pendant lamps to more and more original shapes, wall lamps and solutions that, combining different models, create decorative settings of strong impact; from optic fibre to candles; from design lamps to hidden spotlights; from blown glass to crystal; from thermoplastic resins to natural and ecologic materials.
In general, while in the past a great importance was attached to the lamp itself instead of the light it spread, today the trend is to create much more bizarre settings, where light is used to exalt the architectonical choices. That's why locales' illumination is more and more committed to professionals who are guided by two criteria in the designing: to move the customer and to enlighten the different areas of the locale in order to let both operators and customers feel at their ease. With a softer and more "chill out" lighting where they mostly offer service, in spite of a more vivid and uniform where they mostly sell products.
Always in line with regulations that are stricter than they ever were before. Generally speaking, producers prefer to propose a basic type-tested system that can be personalized according to the locale's stile and needs.



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