Lighting an Art-Centric Hotel

The Daxton hotel was conceived as a means to elevate the beautiful suburb of Birmingham, Michigan, by adding a unique, art-filled boutique hotel to the mix of traditional lodging offerings. 

Today, Morlights Founder Avraham Mor is taking you behind the scenes, spotlighting the ways that our team’s extensive background illuminating some of the most noteworthy and brilliant museum exhibits across the country guided our approach to lighting The Daxton’s unique collection of artwork as a gallery of its own within the new hotel.

Parallels Between Lighting Museums and Lighting Artwork  

When envisioning a museum exhibition that made an impact on you, was it the incredible artifacts on display, the story being told, or the emotions the exhibit exuded that made the experience memorable for you? When lighting a museum exhibition, our goal is to consider all of these enduring moments with our designs, properly lighting the artifact itself, but also creating a story and filling the room with emotion. Light is a powerful tool. 

Let’s start with one very critical consideration: angles. We always have to think about if the person standing in front of a piece is going to create a shadow of themselves that could potentially distort their impression of the art. Or, if it’s a sculpture, we have to design lighting that hits the piece from all 360-degrees. The ultimate goal is to angle the lighting thoughtfully in a way that ensures any inevitable shadows do not distract from the piece.

Next would be color: the color of light on the piece is key to the way we experience a museum moment. When illuminating a spectacular Monet piece at The Art Institute of Chicago, we ran into a color debacle, as it was lit with incandescent sources for years, which naturally have very little blue coloring. In the long-term best interest of the exhibit, we upgraded the lighting to include LED lamps, which actually include a bit more blue that ended up striking the visual balance needed. The Monet curators were quick to notice how much better the blues looked in the piece!

Applying Museum Lighting Strategies

When it came to designing The Daxton, one of our biggest challenges was not knowing all of the art we would be required to light. This is a typical occurrence in the design process for a museum project but less common in an architectural project, such as a hotel. 

Once the collection was finalized and installed, our next hurdle was determining the optimal angles of light for each individual piece of art. The best location for light, no matter the space, is always in the architecture itself – i.e the ceiling, walls, windows – which we map out on a reflected ceiling plan. Our approach in a museum setting would be to install track heads in the ceiling and inner architecture, but that tactic would have directly affected the clean aesthetic of the hotel space. 

We worked with the rest of the design team to strike a balance between concealing the lighting as we would in a hotel, and making the art stand out like in an exhibit setting by layering feature lighting with carefully designed ambient light. Thanks to this balance, we were able to hit the right angles while not having the controls or other behind-the-scenes systems distracting from the work itself.

Bringing the Daxton to Light

You name it – a full-scale pink bunny, giant unicorn sculpture, ornate chain chandelier, or geometric structure – and The Daxton has it all on display! We looked at each piece as an exhibit that lives in the museum that is the hotel and employed our extensive expertise and passion for exhibition design to make each moment throughout the guest experience count. Our hope is that everyone that walks through the door of the high-style, artistic space leaves with a lasting impression of how they felt, what they learned, or experienced while staying at The Daxton!