Commercial Heritage

BLOG

Perth, 29^th April 2014

One of my new projects in Perth is the renovation of an old heritage building, currently occupied by a bank (yes, who else 🙂 ). The heritage building has been integrated as part of a corporate tower complex (also owned by the bank as no surprise), however in the new development as there are quite a few in Perth, the old heritage building will be commercialised to and turn to a trendy hub with restaurants, bars and café’s and the like. These buildings are totally in as new destination venues for day and night time entertainment, obviously making much more money to their owners then being used as offices with no revenues.

So there we go…our task is to create a skeleton structure that will be able to accommodate the future tenants and we of course will be in charge of developing the lighting concept. However therein lies quite a challenge. The first and probably most complex is to integrate the lighting within the heritage fabric of the building and while I still have a meeting with the heritage consultant tomorrow I am pretty familiar of what the heritage limitations are considering the interiors and exteriors that we are taking on have a more than a century’s worth of history…both exteriors as well as the interiors are very ornate and the opportunity to touch the ceiling, walls and floors will be very limited. This means we will have to be creative within the existing lighting points and unobtrusive locations in finding our lighting solutions.

The other challenge will be to develop the lighting infra-structure in such a way that it will allow the future tenants to be flexible with the lighting to “tune” it to their needs without really affecting the overall feel and look of the heritage lighting approach. It is likely that we will develop customised solutions with a heritage feel to match the overall space but with modern technology lighting “invisibly” integrated inside. I already have my mind racing with ideas which I will put to the tests in the coming days to see if I can get the whole project team excited…

Light Watch 5-70: Some of the beautiful old details we will have to deal with pictured here during today’s site inspection. Some of the old light fixtures butchered with CFL lamps of different sizes and colours!