QELA Award Winning Lighting
Retail Lighting Project of the Year Interior category at the Light Middle East Awards was won by dpa lighting consultants for their work on the QELA Boutique, Doha. Gary Campbell of dpa lighting said;
“QELA is part art gallery and part high-end fashion boutique. The gallery displays change every few weeks with new exhibitions and the merchandise displays also change from time to time. Therefore a lighting design was required that provided full flexibility and ease of use by the store manager, brand visual merchandising team and gallery curator.”
QELA is a luxury fashion store located on The Pearl, a man-made island in Doha, Qatar/UAE. The QELA brand combines up-market fashion with the exhibition of art works. The 750 square metre boutique extends over two floors. The challenge for the lighting designers from dpa lighting was to combine lighting solutions for the designer clothes and luxury goods on display and for the art works, and at the same time to create a luxurious and intimate atmosphere.
Dimmable cove lighting accentuates the curtains that line certain sections of the walls on both floors. The central atrium is lit from the first floor ceiling. This indirect component, together with the circumferential cove lighting and the ceiling recessed downlights on both floors, provides the ambient lighting in the store. The lighting solutions are highly diverse and give rise to clearly legible zones. All in all, the boutique makes for a luxurious, opulent and yet somehow homey atmosphere. The lighting plays a significant role in creating the extravagantly unusual layered space.
Strategic design consultancy Uxus was tasked with creating the boutique-cum-gallery that is split across two levels connected by a sleek, freestanding staircase and topped by a domed ceiling whose design reflects the architecture of the region. dpa lighting design worked with Uxus to deliver a lighting scheme that blended seamlessly into the architecture of the building and enabled staff to present luxury items at their best.
For the front-of-house areas, the brief was to design a lighting solution that provided a luxurious layered lighting appearance to accentuate the high-quality finishes, architectural interiors and features, and displays. All lighting had to be very flexible, controllable, and high colour rendering, with luminaires integrated into the interior wherever possible, as dpa’s Gary Campbell explains;
“The client brief included a number of criteria including state-of-the art light equipment in terms of sources, flexibility attachments and lenses, control, flexibility, and energy efficiency.”
QELA BOUTIQUE, DOHA – QATAR
