Planning & design guidance — brief to hand-over
Project Consulting
Lighting consulting sits between architecture, electrical engineering, and operations — and the gaps between those three are where most schemes fall apart. The brief drifts during tender, the photometric model never gets reconciled with the procured fixtures, and the commissioning team inherits a design they had no part in writing. Our consulting practice exists to keep one thread running through all of it: the same studio that takes the brief writes the calculations, the BoQ, and the tender documents, and stays on the file through site delivery and the first night of commissioning.
How we work.
Brief & site survey
Site walk, existing-conditions audit, and a structured brief that pins down the lighting class, programme, and operational expectations before any photometric work starts.
Concept & masterplan
A lighting masterplan document setting out the design intent, hierarchy, and zoning — readable by architects, engineers, and the client at the same level of detail.
Photometric calculation
DIALux / Relux models proving the scheme hits the target lux, luminance, and uniformity values for every application area and lighting class on the site.
Specification & BoQ
A detailed bill of quantities and technical specification keyed to the photometric model — fixtures, controls, drivers, mounting, and accessories — written to be tendered.
Tender support
Tender clarification responses, alternate-product equivalence checks, and value-engineering reviews that protect the design intent through procurement.
Commissioning
On-site commissioning, scene programming, and a final walk-through with a hand-over package the operations team can actually use after the studio leaves.
What this service covers.
What consulting actually means
On most projects the lighting consultant is the one person whose only mandate is to make sure the night-time experience matches what was promised at concept. Architects design in daylight; electrical engineers design for compliance; contractors design for buildability. Lighting consulting reconciles those three forces around a photometric brief, and protects that brief through the dozens of small decisions — pole heights, optic distributions, control zones, dimming curves — where a scheme is either preserved or quietly compromised.
The consulting deliverable is not a single drawing. It is a stack of documents — masterplan, calculations, BoQ, specifications, tender responses, commissioning report — that together let the client procure and operate the scheme without needing the studio to be on the phone every week.
Compliance and standards
Roadway lighting on Cyprus public infrastructure is normally governed by EN 13201 (lighting classes M, C, P depending on traffic category). Interior workplaces follow EN 12464-1, with task-specific lux targets and uniformity requirements per activity. Sports lighting follows EN 12193 (Class I/II/III). Outdoor architectural lighting overlays the Cyprus light-pollution and dark-sky considerations, particularly in coastal and rural sites where over-illumination has real ecological cost.
The compliance audit early in the consulting process catches the expensive problems before they are designed in: a pedestrian crossing that needs a higher class than the surrounding road, a sports facility that has been speced to recreational class but is intended to host competitions, a hospitality interior whose colour-rendering target conflicts with the chosen fixture family.
Specification and tender
A specification that survives tender is a specification that names the things that matter — photometric distribution, colour temperature, CRI, IP and IK ratings, control protocol, driver tolerance — and is silent on the things that do not, so contractors can substitute equivalent products without breaking the design. A specification that names a manufacturer SKU and stops there will be value-engineered in week two of tender; a specification that names performance criteria and equivalence rules will hold.
Tender support is the unglamorous half of consulting. Most clarification rounds ask for one of three things: a fixture substitution, a driver substitution, or a quantity correction. The studio that wrote the BoQ is the only party that can answer the first two without re-running the calculation, and that is what keeps the design defensible through procurement.
What you get.
- Lighting masterplan document (PDF) describing design intent, hierarchy, and zoning
- DIALux / Relux photometric calculation files with per-area lux, luminance, and uniformity reports
- Bill of quantities with fixtures, controls, drivers, mounting accessories, and quantities
- Technical specification keyed to the BoQ — written to be tendered without ambiguity
- Compliance audit against EN 13201 (roadway), EN 12464 (interior), or the relevant standard
- Tender clarification log + alternate-product equivalence review
- Commissioning report and as-built lighting documentation for hand-over
Common questions.
- When in the project should we bring in a lighting consultant?
- As early as concept design. The decisions that drive the lighting outcome — pole positions, ceiling heights, façade construction, control infrastructure — are taken in the first weeks of the project. Bringing the consultant in at tender stage means designing around constraints that have already been fixed, instead of shaping them.
- Do you specify a single manufacturer or stay product-agnostic?
- Product-agnostic by default. The specification names photometric distribution, colour temperature, CRI, IP/IK rating, control protocol, and driver tolerance — performance criteria that any qualified manufacturer can meet. We will name preferred fixtures when the photometric model is genuinely tight, but the goal is a specification that survives tender on its merits.
- Which compliance standards do you work to in Cyprus?
- EN 13201 for roadway and pedestrian lighting, EN 12464-1 for interior workplaces, EN 12193 for sports facilities, EN 12193 / IES guidance for architectural floodlighting, plus the Cyprus building regulations and any local light-pollution / coastal-zone considerations. The compliance audit is part of the masterplan deliverable.
