Lighting design
Restaurant and Bar Lighting
A restaurant has to be several rooms in one day. Darkroom designs and supplies lighting for restaurants, bars and dining venues that holds up from a bright weekday lunch through to a full evening service, and that makes both the food and the people at the table look the way they should.
01
Lighting is part of the offering, not part of the fit out
People decide how they feel about a restaurant before the menu arrives. Lighting is doing most of that, and it is doing it in a way almost no guest could describe. It decides whether a table feels private or exposed, whether the room feels full at half capacity, whether a bar reads as somewhere to settle in or somewhere to pass through.
It also has a commercial job. Light the tables properly and the room draws the eye to occupied seats. Light the space evenly and flatly and a half empty restaurant looks half empty from the street.
02
The decisions that matter most
Light the table, not the room
The strongest restaurant schemes put controlled light onto the tables and let everything else fall away. Narrow beams, careful aiming and enough contrast to make each table feel like its own space. It is the single most effective move available and it is the one most often lost to a uniform downlight grid.
How the food looks
Colour rendering and colour temperature decide whether a plate looks appetising or grey. Warm light with strong rendering flatters food, timber, brass and skin. It is worth specifying properly, because photographs of the food end up doing a great deal of the venue marketing.
How the guests look
Overhead light alone throws shadows down a face. A scheme that includes some light at or near eye level, from wall lighting, decorative pendants, candles or table lamps, is more flattering and keeps people comfortable in it for longer, which affects both the average spend and the review.
Day to night
A venue open from breakfast to close needs at least three or four distinct lighting states. Bright and clean in the morning, a working lunch level, an early evening transition and a low, warm late setting. These are set once during commissioning and then run from a single button per scene, so the outcome does not depend on which manager is on shift.
The bar
Bar backs are a display problem before they are a lighting problem. Bottles need light through them or behind them rather than on them, the working surface needs enough light for the staff to pour accurately, and the till and the guest side both need to be usable without a spotlight on anyone.
The pass and back of house
The kitchen and the pass need functional, high rendering light so plating is checked under conditions close to what the guest will see. Front of house and back of house lighting must be separated so the kitchen never bleeds into the dining room.
03
Running costs and hours
A restaurant runs its lighting for long hours, often twelve or more a day, seven days a week. That makes fitting efficiency and control strategy a direct operating cost rather than an abstraction, and it makes fitting life and maintenance access a labour cost. We work the numbers at concept stage so the specification can be tested against them.
Dimming is where most of the saving sits. A scheme dimmed to sixty percent for the majority of trading hours costs meaningfully less to run and lasts longer, and it usually looks better as well.
04
Working around a trading venue
Refurbishing a restaurant that is still open is a scheduling problem as much as a design one. Fittings are ordered and delivered before the shutdown starts, work is planned around the quietest trading days, and the scheme is designed so that as much as possible can be installed on existing circuits and positions where the ceiling cannot be opened up.
On new venues the lighting programme is tied to the ceiling and the joinery, and commissioning is scheduled after dark and before the soft opening rather than on the morning of it.
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Restaurant and bar projects
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Talk to us about your venue
New venue, refurbishment, or an existing restaurant that has never felt right after seven. Tell us what the space is and how it trades, and we will come back with what we would change and what it would cost.
More lighting services
Other areas of work
Enquire
Talk to us about your venue
New venue, refurbishment, or an existing restaurant that has never felt right after seven. Tell us what the space is and how it trades, and we will come back with what we would change and what it would cost.