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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Lighting designer Caitlin Faron is a behind-the-scenes wizard. Here, we train a beam on three dazzling works by this alchemist of light.

Caitlin Faron is possibly one of the most talented lighting designers you’ve never heard of. But that’s no knock on her. While the names of celebrated architects and interior decorators and landscape designers are part of the cultural lexicon, lighting designers remain very much off-stage figures, quietly working their magic out of public view. And that’s a pity; because many of us underestimate the defining role that light plays in shaping our experience of a space.

‘Light affects everything, ’ says Faron, who founded the Southampton-based Shine-Design in 2009, a practice that specializes in interior and exterior residential projects. ‘How colors look, how we perceive distance and depth, how we feel in a room, are all a function of light and the designer’s ability to bend and manipulate it.’  In many high-end houses, she observes, lighting remains an afterthought. Her best advice? Plan ahead. ‘The decorator might have an amazing chandelier, but what sort of a lighting scheme will you put in place to support that chandelier? Good lighting design should be of a piece with the form and use of the space, and for that, you need to start early.’ Here, Faron gives a guided tour of some recent dazzlers:

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 Five-hundred-square-foot glass pavilion, Amagansett
 ‘This is such a cool structure for entertaining,’ says Faron. ‘Because it occupies a prominent place on the property and is visible from multiple viewing points, we installed triangular fixtures that wash light up from the ceiling, and, on top of the tie beams, a linear run of LED, giving it a real presence in the landscape. ‘

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 Amagansett kitchen
‘We’ve got five different types of lighting in this kitchen and everything is switched separately so you can create different kinds of settings based on how you’re using the room. So as not to compete with a set of big vintage pendants hanging over the prep island, the lighting had to be discrete.  We used LED puck lights because they’re small and unobtrusive and illuminate a work area with little spots of fantastically concentrated light, and also because they complemented the semi-industrial look of the structure. We even recessed one into the bottom of a beam over the sink.

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 Converted barn, North Haven
‘The idea here was to create a dialogue between the reclaimed wood trusses, the intimate core seating area with fireplace, and the outer activity areas which required more light. At each truss location, we used recessed wall washers for which I specified a custom rubbed-bronze trim that pointed up the warm tones in the wood, and installed accent lights at the roof ridge to illuminate the stone chimney, filling in with lamps in the seating area. It took a lot of fixtures and a couple of mock-ups to convince the client, but the results were effective and dramatic.’

 

 

 

 

BY JUSTINE EYRE
To see more of Caitlin Faron’s work, visit www.shine-design.net

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