The Old Courthouse Apartments
Residential · United Kingdom
COMPLETED 2020
Student accommodation is the purest version of an argument this trade has every day: every decision is multiplied by the bed count, the building pays its own communal electricity bill, and anything that fails has to be fixed in the few weeks between one cohort leaving and the next arriving. That pushes a specification towards very few product types, each chosen so it can do more than one job. There are two products in this scheme. That is not a gap in the brief — it is the brief.
Studio Apartment
One Downlight, Every Room in the Flat
A studio is a bedroom, a kitchen and a study in one room, with a shower room off it, and the temptation is to specify a different fitting for each of those. RL-DL1601 is here instead because it is rated IP65 and listed for humid interiors, which means the same downlight that sits over the bed can sit over the hob and inside the wet room without a second product, a second cut-out size or a second item in the spares cupboard. Multiply that across a building of studios and the saving is not in the unit price, it is in the ordering, the install and the turnaround week three years later when six of them need swapping. The 110° beam and the diffused face are doing the other half of the work: in a room this small with pale walls, a narrow or hard-edged downlight would scallop the walls and make the space read smaller than it is. The anglepoise lamps on the desk and the bedside are the fit-out's, not part of the package — which is deliberate, because a student should be able to light their own desk at their own angle.
Communal Lounge
The Room on the Landlord's Meter
The communal lounge is a basement room with a tile grid, exposed ductwork and no daylight worth counting, which means it runs its lighting most of the hours it is occupied — and unlike the studios, that electricity is on the landlord's bill rather than the tenant's. That is the whole reason to care which panel goes in. RL-PNL2670 is the most efficient in its family at 130 lm/W, against 110 for the otherwise comparable 595 × 595, and across a room of this size running most of the day the difference compounds into real money over a lease. Laid flat into the grid at a 120° beam, it does what a common room needs — a broad, even, unfussy field that works equally for a group round the table and one person asleep on the sofa. Where colour quality matters more than efficacy, RL-PNL2664 is the CRI 90 alternative in the same family at 120 lm/W, which would be the call in a room used for interviews or study rather than this one. The timber wall, the green feature wall and the ductwork are the fit-out's.
Project specification
Every product in this project
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This project sits alongside Regents LED's wider portfolio of residential, hospitality and architectural lighting across the UK, Europe and the Gulf.
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