Lighting design firm Visual Terrain was selected to bring to life the many different levels of lighting required in three elegant and modern retail settings—the Hugo Boss stores in Costa Mesa, Calif.; Los Angeles; and New York. The design team was led by Michael Mahlum, director of Design & Production at Visual Terrain’s Chicago office. Kate Furst, lighting designer at Visual Terrain’s Los Angeles-area office, directed the storefront designs for the South Coast Plaza and New York City locations. Both designers worked closely with engineers from the chosen lighting manufacturer, Tivoli LLC, to find the perfect solution for a variety of specific lighting applications required throughout each retail location.
Tasked with providing the proper illumination for the storefront locations in Costa Mesa and New York, Visual Terrain chose Tivoli’s Illumiline, which accents and showcases the window design but does not detract from the display itself. Illumiline, a 1W SMD LED linear fixture, distributes a 120-degree beam spread for a bright even glow for illumination effects within 3 inches of the light source with up to a 2-foot throw of light from the source. It also features a small rectangular profile of 1/2 by 9/16 inch that enables it to fit into profiles of less than 1 inch. The narrow profile and the even distribution of light casts a soft continuous glow of light along the top and bottom of each window. The soft light reflects onto the brushed metal mesh inside each window creating a 3-D effect. This solution achieved the desired effect without the use of optics, which was originally thought to be required by the design team.
To create the stunning coves that accentuate the main area of the store, the designers selected Tivoli’s award-winning Coveline 120. This architectural illumination SSL solution runs directly off basic line voltage. It delivers a low-maintenance, energy-efficient LED lighting solution with no driver loss, low power factor and virtually eliminates any dimming issues. Using only 5.5 watts per foot with a CCT of 3000K, Coveline 120 operates at 120V AC. The flexible system bends 90-degrees horizontal and 30-degrees vertical to fit concave and convex curves without special hardware, making it an easy to install solution for the stores’ cove illumination and also for the toe kick area under the cashier desk.
Featuring directional mounting and adjustability of plus or minus 10, 20 and 30 degrees, designers were able to manually set the angular throw of light individually, distributing light over a 160-degree area with the Standard Model Series. One of the objectives of this project for Visual Terrain was keeping color consistency throughout the store design despite using a mixture of LED and fluorescent sources. The challenge was to make sure that all the sources in the store matched as closely as possible because there can be many variations of 3000K. To achieve the color consistency and visually coordinate with the 3000K fluorescent fixtures, the team used Tivoli’s custom-color temperature mixing capabilities.
All of the Tivoli Coveline 120 product was specified and manufactured with a custom color specifically developed for Hugo Boss. This color was formulated to coordinate with fluorescent elements still in use in displays in the store so that a consistent color was achieved. Tivoli has the ability for designers to identify a specific Pantone number or X,Y coordinate on the CIE 1931 color chart and produce a color LED module specific to that color. For this particular project, Tivoli tested several combinations and visually coordinated a match to the 3000K fluorescent. In addition to the color matching capabilities, the Coveline 120 product features the Tivoli T-Bin T2: MacAdam Ellipse sub-binning targets within 2 standard deviation from the Bin target. The use of these tools and methodologies greatly assisted the designers in achieving their objective of color consistency throughout the entire design.