Twenty years of exhibiting at the Homebuilding & Renovating Show

It seems hard to believe, but this November will mark twenty years since we first exhibited at the Homebuilding & Renovating Show in Harrogate. A lot has changed over those twenty years and some things have remained reassuringly familiar.

Our show stand was rather different. We’d been in business for less than a year at this point and we didn’t have any photographs of finished work. We had visuals of work in progress, copies of plans and a brand spanking new visual identity courtesy of Jeff at Bluemantle who designed our logo, our leaflet and our showstand graphics. They’ve served us well.

In the absence of finished projects to display we took a variety of technologies. Brilliant’s scope in those days extended beyond lighting and we had a multiroom audio system, a remote access heating control system and lighting control from Rako. This was before Sonos, before Nest, before Ring. The two biggest draws on the stand were probably the faux fur on the beanbag and the vase of lillies. We were overrun; it was the point we fully realised that we had a proposition that people wanted to talk to us about.

Wind forward twenty years. We’re still exhibiting at Harrogate. We’ve shifted our focus to concentrate entirely on lighting, lighting design and lighting control. That focus has allowed us to grow into one of the largest residential lighting design companies in the country and the only Lutron HomeWorks Diamond dealer outside the South East. Residential lighting design remains at the heart of what we do although we design for restaurants, bars, hotels and churches as well as offering bespoke artwork lighting for fine art collections or individual treasures.

The showstand has grown over the years. We’ve got a lot of photos of finished projects; they vie for inclusion now. We’re still demonstrating lighting control. We like to be able to show people exactly what we do rather than just talk about it.

We’re looking forward to the Harrogate Homebuilding & Renovating Show 2024. Melanie is running a Masterclass session on the Saturday lunchtime. Come and see us. We’ve got complimentary tickets for the show; use this link to register and download a pair of tickets.