Diplomatic Quarter
Hospitality & Wellness · Saudi Arabia
COMPLETED 2023
Three rooms, three distances, one rule. Someone waiting for a lift at seven in the morning sees a ceiling two metres above their head. Someone arriving in the main lobby sees a hall the size of a street. Someone crossing the plaza at dusk sees a building, a row of palms and a hundred metres of paving. What holds those together is not a house style but a discipline: in every one of them the fittings doing the work are either hidden in a detail or small enough to vanish, and everything a visitor actually notices is either a decorative piece or a surface being washed.
Lift Lobby
The Room Nobody Is Supposed to Notice
A lift lobby is a room people stand still in, facing a door, with nothing to look at — which makes it the one place where a badly aimed downlight has an audience. Almost all of the light here is indirect. RL-ST1238 runs the full perimeter of the stepped coffer, bouncing off the ceiling plane so the room is lit by a large soft surface rather than by apertures, and that is what keeps the polished marble floor from becoming a mirror of the ceiling. CRI above 90 is doing quiet work too: the palette is a single muted green against cream stone, and low-rendering light turns both of those grey. RL-DL3330-RD fills in at a Ø55 cut-out, small enough to read as a dot rather than a fitting, adjustable so the few that matter can be aimed at the artwork and the door rather than spread evenly over a space nobody lingers in. The signage screen and the artwork are the fit-out's.
Main Lobby
Coves That Do Not Run Straight
The ceiling here is a set of shaped recesses — ovals and soft-edged islands rather than rectangles — and each one is lipped with a continuous line of light. That geometry is the whole specification decision. RL-ST360 is a flexible silicone section rather than a board in a rigid extrusion, because a cove that curves cannot be lit by something that only bends in straight segments: run a jointed product round an oval and every facet shows as a flat spot in what is supposed to be a smooth ring. RL-DL3330-RD returns from the lift lobbies as the general layer, the same Ø55 aperture so the two spaces share one cut-out and one spare. The disc chandeliers and the tall cylinder fittings on the columns are the interior designer's and are not catalogue items — which is the correct division of labour in a room like this. The decorative pieces are what a guest remembers; the catalogue's job is to make sure the stone, the timber and the faces underneath them are worth looking at.
Plaza & Water Feature
Colour in One Place Only
Colour outdoors is easy to overdo and this plaza does the opposite — it puts all of it in the water and leaves everything else warm. RL-UW3036 sits in the channel under the jets, IP68 in 316 stainless and only 12mm deep so it recesses into a tiled trough without a proprietary niche, and it is specified RGBW rather than RGB: the white chip is what keeps a pale blue looking pale rather than washed-out, and it is the difference between a fountain that can also simply be white for a formal evening and one that is always a colour. RL-IG1817 does everything in the ground — the line of markers in the paving, the uplighting at the base of every palm — at 304 stainless, IP65, with 10°, 30°, 45° and 60° optics so a tight beam can climb a trunk and a wide one can mark a path from the same buried housing. RL-FL5223 washes the sandstone, adjustable with beams from 5° to 90° and CRI above 90, which matters on a stone that carries its colour in a very narrow band. The perforated screen panels read as backlit from this angle, though the source behind them is not visible in the photograph.
Project specification
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This project sits alongside Regents LED's wider portfolio of hospitality, commercial and architectural lighting across the Gulf, Europe and the UK.
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