With over 570 hotels spread across the UK and Ireland, Travelodge is the largest independent hotel chain in the UK. The majority of their hotels are conveniently located in busy towns and cities and host everyone from those traveling on business to pleasure seekers and site seeing tours. The appeal of the humble Travelodge is their value for money, while still maintaining a relaxed and friendly aesthetic.
A large town in Nottinghamshire plays hosts the newest Travelodge development. Mansfield is home to a variety of shopping opportunities, entertainment venues, restaurants, and business hubs and sees a wealth of visitors each year. With a rich history, Mansfield is perfectly located with many famous sites nearby including Sherwood Forest, Hardwick Hall, and many market towns and picturesque villages.
The Development
The four storey hotel, built in the heart of town, contains three floors of accommodation with the ground floor hosting a spacious foyer, as well as retail units for local businesses. The exterior of the site sees a number of perimeter walkways, the building's entrance, and a customer car park.
The Project
We were invited to assess the needs of the development and create an elegant lighting scheme to meet the strict aesthetics of this high profile client. The hotels’ exterior lighting needed to combine function, style, as well as taking the local area into consideration.
With an array of business and residential properties in the local vicinity, light spill was a big factor when creating the best possible design. Lighting the car park efficiently and creating illuminated pathways were the other criteria.
The Solution
Starting in the car park our Lighting Design Team needed to create effective illumination for guests to safely maneuver around the space while emitting little to no back spill, which could have an impact on local residents.
ITALO, the Italian built luminaire was the perfect choice as its reflector based systems made it easy to direct light where needed without any spill. Mounted at 6m high, we combined SO5 and STE-M asymmetric optics which ensured light only reached where it was needed. By minimizing the amount of luminaires mounted at high level, we kept the levels low with five ITALO fittings.
The DECO 2.0 was designed with a reflector cone to offer a gentle, even distribution with no upward light. These bollards were placed in the car park to further reduce any chances of sky glow.
The QUARTO wallpack were placed around the front and back entrances combining both flood and cycle optics to achieve an accurate distribution without causing light spill. Both functional and in keeping with the building's aesthetics, these quality luminaires were placed to perfectly illuminate the pathways.
Without intruding on the signature blue illumination seen on every Travelodge, a subtle wall wash was creating using TULA along the building's façade. The Italian built luminaire with a one way illumination was added to the scheme to not only bring additional lighting around the building perimeter but to bring an air of elegance to the design.
By utilizing an array of optics we created a functional lighting scheme that accentuates the building's features and created a low glare design that alleviates light spill, protecting local residential areas.
