Lights that never leave your guests in the dark

Nobody sets out to buy lighting control. What people want is a house where the lights do what a sensible person would expect, without a manual. The rules below are how you get there. They are ours, we design every villa to them, and every line on our bills can be traced back to one of them.

One circuit for each fixture type in each zone

A majlis with a chandelier, downlights and a cove has three circuits rather than one, because nobody has ever wanted the chandelier and the cove on the same switch. In an open plan, each function becomes a zone of its own, so the living, dining and majlis areas are lit separately, and a large open space ends up with four or more circuits divided by what the light is for.

This is what makes scenes possible later on, and it is also what keeps the bill honest. Each circuit takes one channel in the distribution board, a relay channel if it is switched and a dimmer channel if it dims, so you can count them for yourself.

Scenes, not a button for every circuit

The failure everyone has seen is the sixteen-button kitchen: seven circuits, a button for each, a few extra for good measure, and a client who can never remember which one is the cove. The rule that prevents it is simple. Controls are scenes and intentions, never one button per circuit, so the kitchen's seven circuits become about four buttons, such as Cook, Eat, Late and Off. The circuits live inside the scenes, and the actuators in the board do the work.

Dimming rides on the scene or the screen in the same way. It never turns into a pair of buttons for every dimmable circuit, which is exactly how a four-button plate grows into a twelve-button one.

One control point per room, at the door

Every room has one primary control point, placed where you walk in. Secondary points appear only where someone genuinely needs control from somewhere else, such as the bedside or a second entrance, and they are small, one or two gangs at most. Two full keypads in one room is almost always a mistake.

From this follows the rule that gives this article its name: nobody crosses a dark room. A bedroom has control at the door and at the bedside, working two ways. A corridor has control at both ends, or a presence sensor. If a design would make someone walk through the dark to reach a switch, the design is wrong.

Every button also has to justify itself where it sits, by naming the scene or the load it serves at that position, or it is deleted. There is no quota of buttons in either direction.

Presence sensors where you pass through, not where you live

Corridors, stairs, lobbies, the guest WC, wardrobes and utility spaces light themselves. A presence sensor switches them on as you walk in and off once you leave, and nobody gives them another thought, which is precisely what presence sensors are for.

Living rooms and bedrooms are another matter. Nobody wants the bedroom lights to come on because they rolled over, or the majlis to go dark because everyone sat still through a film. Those rooms are controlled by scenes, and a presence sensor in a living space is a template mistake that we do not make.

The service rooms sit outside all of this. The maid's room, the driver's room, the laundry, the store and the plant room get no automation, because a keypad in the laundry inflates the bill and nobody ever uses it. They are still covered by the WiFi.

Dimming is a choice, made room by room

Dimming is decided per room, and the default is on/off everywhere except the cinema. When you do ask for dimming, the method has to match the fixtures. It is the driver inside an LED fitting that decides whether a given dimmer can control it, and pairing the wrong type of dimmer with a load can damage the hardware. So the design sizes the dimmer channels to what has actually been specified, takes the edge type from the driver's datasheet, and marks the line "to confirm" wherever that datasheet is not yet known. What it never does is guess.

Dimming is not a way to make a house feel expensive; it is a way to make a few rooms feel right in the evening. Ask for it where you will use it, and the bill will show you what each room's dimming costs.

A board with room to change, and a reason on every line

Behind all of this sit the distribution boards, holding the actuators, the dimmers and the bus power supply. The supply is sized to the milliamps that every device draws, with margin in hand, and the boards keep roughly 15% of their ways spare so that the next change does not call for a new board. That line on the bill is the difference between a house that can be changed and a house that has to be rewired.

The bill itself reads room by room: the circuits and whether they dim, the control point at the door and its buttons, the bedside points and the sensors, and beside each one the rule that put it there. If a line has no reason, it is not on our bill. See a slice of one, or send us your plans and see yours.