Happy Christmas and thank you.
We’re winding up for 2022. The team are still working and out onsite a lot of the time this week; this time of year sees a lot of projects trying to finish up. We’ll be closing on Friday, coming back on January 3rd.
It’s been an extraordinary year. We started the year with one Prime Minister, ended with another and had another one inbetween. We’ve had ridiculous economic instability, noisy politics and a genuinely scary surge of inflation that many of us had forgotten about and even more of us had never known. These are very tough times so we’re grateful for our wonderful clients who are still working on fabulous projects and continuing to put a value on great lighting.
We’ve strenghthened the lighting design team over the year. Jules joined us early in 2022 and that brings the team of lighting designers to five with Melanie, Rebecca, Claire, Fran and Jules. Matt has done an extraordinary job this year; effectively doing two people’s jobs and we hope we’ll be able to find another brilliant project manager in the not too distant future. Hayley’s done a grand job of managing products, orders and suppliers. We’ve looked like a DPD warehouse at times but as I write this all is relatively calm as most of the fittings and Lutron components are out on our clients’ sites doing what they should be doing.
We’ve been able to get back out and about taking photos of finished projects after two years of restrictions. It’s been really exciting for me as I’ve taken on our project photography. I’ve got to say a huge thank you to Simon Warren, a brilliant architectural photographer responsible for many of the amazing photos on this website. Simon’s an excellent tutor and a very good critic. I spent a couple of days with him in Folkestone in February doing some intensive training in shooting in challenging lighting conditions and I’ve tried to bring some of that back to our project photo shoots this year. My favourite shot of the year is probably the Peter Paul preparing to put to sea, taken in Folkestone Harbour before sunrise when the light was doing extraordinary things. Thank you Simon, it’s been great fun. Nine hours after taking that pic I was doing my first “official” project shot for Brilliant Lighting in the New Forest.
That’s just about it. Thank you to everyone who’s come to see us at shows this year. We’ll be at the Homebuilding & Renovating Show at the NEC in March. I hope everyone has a great festive season. I think we’ve all earned it, don’t you?