Lord & Taylor’s project in Ridge Hill, New York is testimony to the strength and competence of Italian business to support complex markets like the US with top quality structures, services and products.
Reggiani USA, headquartered in New Jersey and operating in the American market for 20 years, was involved in this exciting “New Concept” for Lord & Taylor in 2012. It supplied a custom lighting system integrating high-end LED, metal halide, fluorescent technologies and structurally echoing the triangular pattern of the building’s façade. The resulting roughly 2.6 m-sided modular triangular lighting structures can provide accent, diffused, direct and/or indirect lighting.
These large, white or black pendant triangles help push the boundaries in this “pure white” big department store (7400 m², with average ceiling heights of 6 m), making Ridge Hill more unique and revolutionary than Lord & Taylor’s Fifth Avenue flagship in New York. The lighting designer was afforded the opportunity of providing really effective lighting for the space and the merchandise due to the top quality colour rendering and high-efficiency optics, while still managing to comply with the restrictive energy consumption limits now imposed throughout the United States.
The volume of the store’s interior space is defined by both the elegant white box (floors and ceilings) and by twister and/or mushroom shaped sculptural columns, providing a strong, stimulating contrast with the sharp corners of the rest of the project’s structures. Reggiani’s luminous triangles become a smart solution to define the lighting design of this innovative project without being monotonous and clichéd. The strategically placed black triangular pendants immediately draw attention upward, becoming an orientation tool for the public, while emphasising the pathways and the store’s primary volumes.
Designed and developed “on a paper napkin in a restaurant” during one of the many business meetings held for the project (with L&T’s Store development Manager as well as the architect), the product was developed in a record three months, using sophisticated lighting design “engines”, which feature in the standard components of the Reggiani listings. The cutting-edge in-house workshops of Reggiani Illuminazione, based in Sovico (MB), made it possible to rapidly engineer and manufacture a product that complies with the restrictive UL certification standards required for the US market.
The case of Lord & Taylor USA proves how successful Italian business has the intelligence and forward vision to support emerging international markets in the complex, fast-moving retail industry. For a company like Reggiani – operating on a worldwide scale for over 50 years and assisting clients like L&T, D&G, Lavazza, Benetton, etc., the market really is global. The extremely modern L&T store won various awards in 2012 for its design approach, which will definitely lead to innovation in the industry.
Products used
– 270 special “Triangles”, with 20 W metal halide lamps and LEDs for indirect lighting;
– 1000 custom made, recessed linear channels, with 20 W metal halide lamps and linear fluorescent lamps