All posts tagged Lighting

Good lighting is essential in a restaurant, which is a shame because lighting gave me the irrates. Is that even a word? My mum used to say it to us when we were annoying her as kids.

But that’s exactly how lighting Hartsyard made me feel. Jeez it was annoying. No two people ever gave you the same information, lightbulbs are being fazed in and out in Australia and no one quite knew when, why or how. Our supply of shades and casings in this land is small and expensive, so we had to look internationally, and shipped things from as far away as a farm in Missouri and something else from a village in Thailand. No joke. It had a shipping time of between 21 and 45 days, so we assume it travelled from the village via tuk-tuk and then hitched a ride on the back a of a concussed migrating bird who misundestood the concept of flying away for the winter.

Eventually I emailed Ash our credit card details and told her to knock herself out. If it were left up to me, I’d be using candles. And torches with rechargeable batteries.

Luckily Ash persevered, and the results I must admit, are well worth the anguish.

Groovy LED strip lighting behind the shelves and bulbs from the lovely Steve at Empirical Style in Melbourne.

Pardon the twisty unlit bulb hanging in the top right of the image. No one’s quite sure where that’s meant to go and I keep forgetting to take it down. It’s not even plugged into anything. I don’t quite know how it got there in the first place.

To deal with such an irritating topic, you need a special sort of electrician.

An electrician who’s not going to get too worked up when he turns up to find that half the lighbulbs have smashed on their journey. Or that you forgot to tell him you need an internet cable for the POS system. Or cabling for a projector, and that all the lighting needs to line up with the tables rather than the symmetry of the roof.

Yes, it takes a special sort of someone to deal with those sorts of issues.

Meet Dave. Part Macgyver, part psychologist, works best under no timeline and lots of caffeine.

D1 electrical services. Using energy inversely proportional to the wattage given out by the bulbs he installs, Dave gets things done casually, creatively and with a wit that suggests he’s been shocked one too many times.

I tell you, lighting turned from something more annoying than standing in line at the RTA to a casual chat over a few live wires.

Oh, will the gang ever get together again? Ashley in New York, Dave in the North Shore (he wanders south on the promise of good coffee) and Tristram in the west.

Good people all, and if we ever got crazy enough to do anything like this again, I’d make sure we’d lined them all up first.

There they are trying to work out how best to install my host light, meant to be a welcoming beacon when you come in the door. Currently it looks like a flacid penis due to an installation difficulty, but Dave promised me he is going to wander back someday and fix it.

Dave doesn’t know I’m writing this plug for him (pardon the pun) and I doubt he’ll be in much of a hurry to read it, but if you’re considering getting your own beehive to harvest wax for candles instead of anything the 21st century is offering with all its LED, non-LED, screw top, edison top nonsense, give Dave a call. He’ll sort it out.

And it might end up looking something like this…

I’m not taking credit for much in this blog. Design by Ashley Couch, lighting by Dave (d1el...@gmail.com) and photos by Guy Wilkinson.

Smarts to hire them all in the first place? Oh that I will own as my personal genius.