Complex lighting in a French restaurant provides old-world charm with a modern twist
Fancy a frite? Restaurant-goers need not fly to Paris—just to the Windy City’s Le Select, a French brasserie turned private-event space. The eatery with European flair opened in 2023 and features a lighting scheme meant to make guests feel as though they have been transported out of the States. To set the scene, lighting design firm Morlights implemented architectural lighting, decorative fixtures, a custom-made false skylight and a complex control system. Though the design and ambience of the space appears effortlessly elegant, and the continued partnership between Morlights, BOKA Restaurant Group and interior designer AvroKO has been fruitful in the past, the making of Le Select was no cakewalk. From Covid-related supply-chain delays pushing the date of opening into another calendar year, to light sources arriving with mismatched color temperatures, to multiple attempts at the manufactured skylight—the restaurant served its creative team a series of challenges on a charcuterie board.
“As with most of our hospitality projects these days, coordinating decorative luminaires with the lighting control system is a huge challenge,” says project lead and Morlights Senior Designer Casey Diers. “Decorative sconces and pendants are always viewed as art first and a luminaire second, and this causes many issues with coordinating good control of output from the lighting control system, as well as generally making the color temperature and illumination levels balance with all the other architectural luminaires in the space.”
For example, in the main dining room alone, there are more than 250 light bulbs in the decorative pendants and sconces. Diers explains that when the design team first set levels, five of the decorative luminaire types with integral LEDs and drivers would not dim low enough to match the levels desired by the client, and therefore required disassembly and installation of neutral density gel media by the lighting designers to reduce light output. Another unexpected hurdle to overcome in the project design was that lamps for the main dimming pendants, though from the same manufacturer, appeared to be greater than 200 CCT apart from one another. This resulted in the team working on a full re-lamping of the dimming pendants a week before Le Select was set to open its doors. Though many of the decorative fixtures had integral LED sources, the team also selected LED replacement lamps by manufacturers Archipelago, Philips and Tala with some additional fixtures by Ecosense, LF Illumination and Lithonia to build the brasserie aesthetic.
The key false skylight meant for use during the day and night posed its own set of unique trials. The original iteration: a glass block with a warm LED glow set behind the glass, quickly proved impractical. Not only would the weight of the glass require unusually thick supports, the lighting behind the glass would be nearly impossible for future service and LED replacement. Finally, the glass posed a potential safety risk—in the event of a fire in the restaurant, there was a good chance the glass would shatter in response to the heat. To combat the myriad of issues, Morlights asked Ravenswood Scenic Studios, a theatrical fabricator the firm had previously worked with, for their aid. Together they found a lightweight, layered solution that still provided the visual the client was hoping to capture. Diers says, “The final system installed is most like a 2-ft by 4-ft drop-ceiling system, except instead of drop-ceiling panels, we have custom-fabricated semi-translucent faux glass vacuform layered acrylic panels. This system had to be carefully coordinated to allow for full access to all junction boxes and drivers, as well as to allow for penetrations through the skylight for the large decorative pendants and sprinkler heads. Above that panel system is a finished, fire-rated drywall ceiling, to which a white-tuning LED panel product (Luminii) is applied, and is controlled via white-tuning DALI- 2 DT8 drivers.” The resulting system, treated to provide an aged appearance, can be adjusted to scenes that mimic the changes in light throughout the day into evening. Scenes such as “Early Evening,” “Mid-Evening” and “Late Night” each become progressively darker and warmer.
With more than 90 zones of control, including 40 multi-parameter white-tuning zones, the restaurant once again has something more nimble happening behind the scenes of its smooth façade. All architectural luminaires are DALI controlled, while more than 200 decorative luminaires use ELV dimming—both from Dynalite. The entirety of the system was programmed on site by a local support from Chicago Lightworks. Though Le Select may have required designers prove their worth more than a few times, Diers says, “The collaborative design process was a joy and is reflected in the final result, where all lighting and interior design elements are aligned and coordinated into a single coherent designed space.”
THE DESIGNERS |
Casey Diers, CLCP, Member IES, is senior designer with Morlights and served as project lead.
Avraham Mor, CLD, IALD, Member IES, is founder and CEO of Morlights.