County Mall

OSRAM lights up County Mall, Crawley

Mark Haynes, general manager, County Mall says, “It’s amazing how tastes change over time. We wanted to take a fresh look at County Mall to make sure the design, atmosphere and services we offered to our visitors and tenants were up-to-date. At the same time, we knew that we were spending too long maintaining the existing lighting system. The bulbs were difficult to replace and the lights themselves needed constant cleaning. It was definitely time to bring it up-to-date.”

PNLD studied the shopping centre and designed a lighting solution that would bring County Mall a new lease of life, whilst at the same time reduce the maintenance costs associated with the incumbent lighting.

An illuminating design for County Mall

Philip Copland, Senior Lighting Designer at PNLD says, “When we first visited County Mall, we saw that the building itself had a very high ceiling but, with its atriums and interconnecting bridges, the space looked complex and cluttered. We wanted to design a new, crisp and clean lighting solution that would draw the eye up through the space and highlight the mall’s special features, whilst modernising the centre.”

A key element of the centre’s refurbishment was a modern art installation, which resembled a ‘flock of birds’, and hung from the ceiling in the centre of the atrium. This created a sense of movement in the mall and needed to be supported by soft, elegant background lighting. PNLD had worked with OSRAM before and turned to the company again to project manage and revive the lighting at County Mall.

Mr. Copland continues, “OSRAM has an unbeatable reputation for quality, so when it came to creating a sense of space, it was an easy choice to make. We knew that OSRAM’s range of LED lighting would be the perfect products to refresh the mall, bringing bright contemporary light into the space, whilst dramatically reducing maintenance time associated with lighting.”

Benefits in terms of lighting control and maintenance

Intelligent controllers provide for the comfortable, flexible and, above all, efficient control of the light sources. Furthermore, the long service life of LEDs as well as their low energy consumption are crucial factors in order to significantly reduce operating, maintenance and running costs. The showcase project in Berlin once again demonstrates the multiple facets and superior flexibility of modern LED technology today.

Light-speed changes

PNLD and OSRAM worked with contractor R S Response, to install the new lighting concept. Together, they worked during the night to avoid any disruption to County Mall shoppers.They updated the entrance to County Mall with striking white LED backlighting to the large exterior ‘CM’ signage. Inside the shopping centre OSRAM also brightened the open space with discrete functional luminaires, using LINEARlight Power Flex LED strip lights in the coves under the escalators.

Inside the mall, the new lighting concept put emphasis on the mall’s vertical features. Ambient light was thrown into County Mall’s main area when the team integrated LEDs into the mall’s architecture and installed large illuminated Barrisol light boxes, giving the illusion of skylights and flooding the mall with light. Philip Copland says, “Throughout the mall it was a matter of simplifying every feature to give a simple, clean effect. This brightened the centre, reduced the sense of clutter and created a crisp, clean and contemporary look.”

OSRAM completed the new lighting scheme with a stylish, curved LED bulkhead and white LED signage at the entrance to the food court using its BackLED LED lighting module. Mr. Copland explains, “With the new signage in place, suddenly the entrance to the food court was transformed. It’s now possible to find the food court easily and it looks modern, exciting and inviting.”

The results

The soft OSRAM lighting draws the eye up through the elegant space of the mall, presenting a pleasant background to the graceful ‘flock of birds’ art installation and creating a pleasant area that shoppers can enjoy. In addition to revitalising the mall, the shopping centre’s team now has highly efficient lighting. Rather than devoting excessive time to maintenance, changing bulbs on high ladders and struggling to keep up with cleaning the old lighting, the County Mall team now benefits from low maintenance LEDs that save time, whilst decluttering the mall.

Mark Haynes concludes, “This was a large project and the team worked closely together to coordinate every detail. Now that we have the new LED luminaires in place, it has transformed the centre from a management perspective. We no longer have to waste time maintaining the lights in the mall. In fact, because they are integrated into the architecture, we don’t even need to clean them. “Aesthetically, the results are impressive. The entire mall is now flooded with light and the centre is a welcoming, contemporary space for shoppers to enjoy the latest fashions from their favourite high street brands.”