The light show
Stepping inside Seven, the most dramatic thing isn’t the furniture
or fabrics, it’s the lighting. The yacht won the Best Lighting
Design award at the 2018 Boat International Design and
Innovation Awards and it’s easy to see why. Seven’s plan does more
than illuminate; it follows furniture contours to reinforce design,
it draws the eye, it directs attention and it soothes the soul.
“We spent probably three times as long on the lighting design
as we did on the décor,” says architect Dante Benini. “For us as
designers, light is the greatest partner. You can transform all the
spaces with light and control the atmosphere day or night.”
For Benini, light is not about illumination of an isolated space;
it has to take into consideration the ambient light straying into
the space. “If you want the look of candlelight, you first have
to copy what is going on outside and use your lights to make the
desired atmosphere.”
The unsung heroes of Seven’s spectacular lighting are the
Italian audiovisual company Videoworks and its lighting
engineering team led by an artist who goes by the name of Leo.
Seven was a two-year project. “We studied the architect’s design
philosophy. We calculate the quantity of light that will be
necessary, whether for a task or for an emotional aspect. Then we
determine how best to deliver that quantity of light,” says Leo.
Like artists, the lighting engineer paints a picture in the
interior, but they do it all with just two “colours”: 2,070K for
the warm tone in the strip lighting and 3,000K for the down
or side lighting. The trick, however, is in the mix. Every light
source is controllable from one to 100 per cent output.
A logarithmic dimming curve matches human eye sensitivity for
subtle change. The control system uses both a Lutron interface
on a wall-mounted five-setting keypad and an iPad interface for
myriad scene variations. In the industry, this is called a DALI
system or Digital Addressable Lighting Interface. Each light gets
an address on a computer control board that is programmed to
know what lights and at which percentage should respond for
preset scenes such as “Gala”, “Welcome” or “Night”, says Leo.189