Lighting

Start with the arc of the evening, not a fixture list

Every good lighting design answers one question first: what should the room feel like at each stage of the event? Arrival, ceremony or keynote, dinner, speeches, dancing and the last song each want a different state. We write those states down as a short list before choosing a single fixture, because the fixture list falls out of the states, not the other way round. A rig that only has one look all night is the most common sign that the brief was a shopping list.

• Arrival: warm, low, architectural. Facade or tree washes outside, uplighting inside, nothing on the guests' faces.
• Ceremony or keynote: focus. A small number of profiles on the people who matter, everything else dropped two stops.
• Dinner: flattering and even. Pin spots on tables and florals, candles doing most of the work, uplighting at 30 to 40 percent.
• Speeches: a single, soft key light on the speaker position so photographs and video are usable.
• Dancing: movement and contrast. Moving heads, colour, haze if the venue allows it, and the room level pulled down so the dance floor reads as the brightest thing.

The four fixture families, in plain English

How many fixtures a room needs

These are the planning figures we use before a site visit. They assume a typical hotel ballroom or country-house room with 3 to 4 metre ceilings and pale walls; dark panelling, mirrors and very high ceilings all push the numbers up. We always count against a floor plan before quoting.

Colour temperature, and why photographers care

Warm white in the 2700 to 3200 K range flatters skin and matches candles and tungsten table lamps. Cool white above 4000 K reads clinical in photographs and fights the room. Most of our decorative washes sit at amber and warm white during dinner and move to saturated colour only once the dance floor opens. If a photographer or videographer is booked, we ask for their preferences early and keep the key light for speeches at a steady warm white with a high colour rendering index, because a flickering or heavily coloured key light is the one thing post-production cannot fix.

What the venue will allow: power, rigging, haze

• Power: an LED rig for a 200-guest dinner and dance floor draws less than a domestic kettle circuit would suggest, usually 3 to 6 kW in total, but it needs to be on its own circuits away from catering. In marquees and gardens we specify generator power with the sound and catering loads combined; see the power and noise guide for garden parties.
• Rigging: hotels and heritage venues rarely allow anything fixed to the fabric. We use freestanding truss, base plates and stands, or battery fixtures that need no rigging at all. Where a venue has certified rigging points we ask for their load documentation before designing around them.
• Haze: moving-light looks depend on haze to show the beams, and haze triggers smoke detectors. Venues either permit a supervised isolation of specific detectors, with a fire-watch, or they do not. We confirm this in writing before promising a beam-heavy dance-floor look.
• Listed interiors: no tape on painted surfaces, no fixtures touching stone or plaster, cable ramps on every route across a floor, and a strike that leaves the room as found. Battery fixtures were made for these rooms.

The five mistakes we fix most often

1. One look all night. The room is lit for dancing at 6 pm and guests eat dinner in nightclub colours.
2. No key light for speeches. The father of the bride gives the speech of his life in silhouette and the video is unusable.
3. Uplighters placed by a caterer at 5 metre spacing, so the walls have scallops of colour with dark gaps between them.
4. Cool-white LED house lights left on because nobody asked the venue how to dim them. We ask at the site visit and often bring a small dimmer for the venue's own lamps.
5. Moving heads with no operator, running a built-in chase. A lighting operator on the night costs less than two extra fixtures and makes the entire rig look intentional.

Lighting for weddings and country houses in Surrey and Berkshire

Most of our wedding lighting work is in country houses and marquees across Surrey and Berkshire, where the brief is usually the same: make a large, formal room feel warm at dinner and alive by 10 pm without a visible rig. Battery uplighting along the walls, pin spots on tables, festoon over the terrace for the transition outside, and a compact moving-light package over the dance floor is the pattern. An operator runs the changes to the running order, so the shift from dinner to dancing happens in a minute rather than as a lights-off, lights-on moment.

How to brief us

• The venue and the rooms you are using, with any floor plans you have.
• The running order, even a rough one, with the moments that must land.
• Photographs of the room in daylight and, if you have them, at night.
• Anything the venue has told you about power, rigging, candles or haze.
• Your colour references: a mood board, a brand guideline, a dress swatch. We match to them rather than to a preset.

From that we produce a lighting plan on the floor plan, a fixture list you can compare against other quotes, and a state list for the evening. If you would rather hire the fixtures and run them yourself, our lighting hire catalogue lists the same kit with day rates, and the Astera range covers most cable-free jobs.