Food court, high bay lighting

About this project

This one is a retrofit, not a new build, and that changes the job completely. The hall was already there, already trading, with tiled prep counters, stalls and tables in place. You cannot design a clean grid on paper and expect it to survive contact with a building that has been extended and patched over the years.

The old lighting was doing what old food court lighting always does. Fine directly underneath, dim by the time you reach the next stall, and yellowing with age so the whole hall looked dirtier than it actually was. In a place where people eat and prepare food, that reads as hygiene, fairly or not.

We went with twelve UFO high bays hung off the existing roof structure, no new steelwork. Mounted at the purlins and spaced so the light overlaps between stalls rather than pooling on each one. The point in a food court is even light across the whole floor, so a customer walking in sees the far corner as clearly as the front counter, and stallholders can actually see what they are preparing.

The other half of the job was doing it without shutting the place. A food court closing for a week is lost income for every stallholder in it, so the work was staged around trading hours. That is the part contractors care about and the part a catalogue never mentions.