Trade and specification
For Architects
and Designers
A number of South African architects and design studios use Darkroom as their standing lighting partner. They do it because we simplify a complicated part of the project, quantify it properly, and hand it back tied to what the project was always trying to be. This page sets out how that works and what you can expect from us.
01
The problem we usually get called in to solve
Lighting sits in an awkward place on most projects. It is a design decision, an engineering decision and a procurement decision at the same time, and it usually has to be resolved at the point in the programme when everybody is busiest.
The result is familiar. A ceiling layout gets drawn to a grid, a schedule gets assembled from whatever data is to hand, a supplier prices it, half of it gets substituted during value engineering, and the scheme that arrives on site is not the scheme that was designed. Nobody set out for that to happen.
What we do is take that whole strand off your desk and give it back to you resolved, priced and buildable, with the design intent still intact at the end of it.
02
Three ways we can be appointed
Technical review and supply
You have a lighting design already, whether it came from your own office or from a consultant. We review the parameters and the layouts technically, flag what will not perform, propose adjustments and work through them with you rather than around you. Then we cost it and supply it.
This is the model most of our long standing studio relationships run on. It keeps the design authorship where it belongs and puts a technical second opinion behind it before anything becomes an order.
Design and supply
We take the lighting from brief to full specification and costing, working inside your team and to your drawings. You and your client see a resolved design and a firm number together, and then decide whether the supply comes from us.
Independent lighting design, product neutral
Where the procurement route requires it, or where the client wants the designer to have no interest in what is bought, we work on studio hours with no supply attached. You receive a specification written to performance rather than to a product range, and it goes to tender in the ordinary way.
03
What you get from us
- Lighting layouts drawn to your standards and coordinated with your reflected ceiling plan
- A fitting schedule with quantities, optics, finishes, dimming protocol and control zone, in a form a QS can price and a contractor can order from
- Manufacturer data sheets and photometric files for everything specified
- Calculations where the project, the client or the compliance requirement calls for them
- A circuiting and control strategy your electrical engineer can work to
- Budget cost information early enough to influence the design, and a firm quotation at specification stage
- Written substitution assessments during value engineering, with the design consequence of each swap stated plainly
- Site attendance through installation, and commissioning and focusing after dark
04
Simplify, quantify, and find the thread
Three things sit behind the way we work, and they are the reason practices come back.
Simplify
A schedule of forty different fittings is usually a symptom rather than a design. We reduce a project to the smallest number of families that will do the job, which cuts the cost, cuts the lead time risk, cuts the number of spares the client has to hold and makes the whole thing far easier to defend when the budget conversation starts.
Quantify
Every recommendation comes with a number attached, whether that is a light level, a load, a lead time or a rand figure. Design decisions are far easier to make and far easier to sell to a client when the consequences are on the page rather than in somebody head.
Find the golden thread
Every project turns on a single idea. We look for it and let the lighting serve it, rather than laying a downlight grid at a metre and a half and hoping. It is the difference between a project that is photographed on opening and a project that still works in ten years.
05
What we will not do
- We will not go around you to your client. The relationship is yours and it stays yours.
- We will not substitute a specified product quietly. If something is unavailable or a saving is being pushed, you get the alternative in writing with the difference explained before anything is ordered.
- We will not take design credit that is not ours. Where we reviewed rather than designed, we say so.
- We will not price a design we know will not perform in order to win the supply.
- We will not disappear at delivery. Commissioning is part of the job, not a favour.
06
Credits and collaboration
Every project we publish credits the architect, the interior designer, the contractor and the photographer. If you would rather a project stayed unpublished, or stayed anonymous, we will honour that without being asked twice.
07
Practical things
- We work to your drawing standards and issue in the formats your team uses
- We attend the design meetings that need a lighting voice and stay out of the ones that do not
- Import lead times are confirmed in writing and flagged against your programme, not discovered at delivery
- Where a project runs in phases or across multiple sites, we hold a standard specification so it stays consistent
- Samples and demonstration fittings can be arranged where a decision needs to be seen rather than described
08
Send us a project
Send through the current drawing set and a note on where the project sits in its programme. We will come back with which of the three routes makes sense, what we would recommend and what the lighting is likely to cost.
Enquire
Send us a project
Send through the current drawing set and a note on where the project sits in its programme. We will come back with which of the three routes makes sense, what we would recommend and what the lighting is likely to cost.