Blog: Lighting an ancient barn: part III – final tweaks and photography
Photographing our finished Hampshire barn lighting design project with Simon Warren.

We’ve been working on this lovely barn conversion since early 2016. Our clients had found us on Houzz and approached us to design a lighting scheme for the barn. 18 months on and this is our latest finished project to be photographed. Warm and cosy barn lighting; it’s a super space and what a great photo for this time of the year.
The photo also illustrates some of the typical challenges in lighting a barn. Vaulted ceilings go hand in hand with next to no usable voids. All of this means ceiling recessed downlights aren’t an option here. Not that they would be a great way to light the space anyway. There’s a need for downlighting for the seating areas but the main focal points are the wonderful stone wall and windows.
The lighting is layered. Powerful ground recessed LED uplights bring out all the colour and texture in the stone wall. Equally importantly they provide a significant level of ambient light for the space; they are much more than accent lights.
Again they’re uplit but mounting lights into the solid stone sill wasn’t an attractive option. Instead we used a custom track. It’s a small track of the kind you’d more typically find in jewelers shops and it allows us to mount lights exactly where they’re needed to pick out the detail of the stone mullions. The fittings are miniature LED spotlights ideally suited for this kind of work.
These are the only photos we’ve got back from the shoot so far. We’ve seen the low resolution proofs from the shoot and they’re great. We’ll have them live on the site soon.
Credits
A big thank you to our clients for their patience while we clambered over their house late at night and thanks to Charlie for another super photo shoot.