Ray Molony: Why ceiling acne is so common

It’s dark and depressing. What’s made it more irksome for me is the realisation that schemes like this are not the exception; they’re the rule. All over the city, all over the country, all across the world, this is what passes for state of the art after 130 years of electric lighting. It wasn’t always like this. Although we’ve had the downlight in various forms since the early part of the nineteenth century, it was the invention by Alex Halberstadt of the low-voltage halogen MR16 lamp at Thorn’s Leicester factory in the 1980s that led to its explosion. 

 

And heady days they were too. First, designers such as Ingo Maurer developed whimsical barewire systems that played on the lightness and the safe, low-voltage characteristics of the lamp. The distinctive pink backlight from the dichroic reflector was seen as an extra attraction. More innovative designs followed and were lapped up the style-conscious yuppies of the era. But then bad things happened. Cheap-as-chips MR16 downlights from the Far East and elsewhere flooded the market. Transformers of variable quality followed, and clients ended up with badly-performing downlights crowding their ceilings. Things couldn’t get any worse.

 

But they did. In 1990, Sylvania invented the mains-voltage halogen lamp – in GU10 and GZ10 formats. The original, the HiSpot, was a high-quality light source, but it was soon imitated and again, container loads of cheap versions were arriving at European ports. Contractors loved them: they were cheap, easy to install and, at the time, gave an aura of sophistication to interiors. 

 

But it was a one-luminaire design that created a terrible lit environment – splodges of light on the floor – and people looked terrible. It was on a par, I would argue, with the cave-like Cat 2 environment that the lighting industry inflicted on people at work. The doyenne of the UK lighting industry, Janet Turner of Concord Lighting, famously called downlights ‘the acne of the ceiling’. Pretty mild abuse, I’d say. The advent of LEDs, instead of giving us new form factors that would kill the downlight, has made matters worse. 

 

Harsh cut-offs associated with the cheaper downlights obviate the spill light that, in the vast majority of cases, made downlighting acceptable in the past. Corridors, for instance, are losing the ‘spill’ light that once gave some welcome illumination to the walls. Don’t get me wrong: I believe the downlight has a role in lighting applications. For example, if you want a scalloping effect along a textured wall – very eighties, but hey-ho – if you want to illuminate an object from above for a particular reason, or if you have a tight space where downlighting is the only option, then fair enough. 

 

But I wholeheartedly object to the thoughtless use of the downlight as the workhorse of a scheme. Lighting designer John Bullock once told me that when he starts on a project, his first thought is: ‘How can I do this without downlights?’ We all need to ask ourselves this question more often.