Restaurants and Hotels are classic service enterprises. As such, they require a lighting atmosphere designed specifically to meet guests’ or diners’ needs. The quality of lighting this necessitates does more than just enhance the visual impact of the hotel or restaurant architecture; first and foremost, it sets the stage for the guests themselves.

To attain that goal, close attention needs to be paid to contemporary lighting design criteria and, in particular, to “lighting quality”. This is a factor shaped by a whole range of quality features – from illuminance, glare limitation and luminance distribution to light color, color rendering, direction of light and modelling.

The basic ingredients of lighting quality are set out in technical standards. But lighting quality also needs to strike the right emotional note for the people, interiors or objects illuminated. This calls for creative use of basic lighting quantities: luminous flux, luminous intensity, luminance and illuminance. And that needs to be based on analysis of the various zones of the establishment.