The Brief

Lucy and her partner Neil set up the art gallery in November 2015 in a two-storey unit on a retail estate in Brompton On Swale, Richmond. The move from her home studio was much needed as her growing success put too much pressure on the family space.

While not on the high street, the retail unit had the great advantages of onsite parking and lots of space.

The gallery is on the ground floor and the ceilings are around the standard height for domestic property and so are ideal for showing what the pictures would look like in a home.

Neil spent weeks researching lighting materials and first tested a commercial track lighting system with fixed, enclosed units, each with 200W equivalent lamps like those seen in store windows.

But this shed light across the walls of the gallery in a wash and made all the art look flat.

He next tested a domestic solution, with multiple units on multiple tracks with more than 100 50W halogen bulbs.

These provided a great colour spectrum but the couple realised that this would be expensive as well as problematic with the load on the lighting circuit. The running costs would be very high and the heat from the lamps was also an issue.

Neil decided to try LED lamps, looking for GU10 models using between 6-8 watts that would match the halogen quality of light. He ordered and tested 20 different types from a variety of online suppliers but every one of them produced poor quality colour. There was no depth and the pictures went flat.