By Michele Zimmerman
You are here: farmland in Three Oaks, MI; it’s mid-October, and the breeze is pleasantly cool. The trees have changed colors and sunset is fast approaching. After learning about beekeeping, touring a micro-distillery, refining your skills in a cooking class, and shopping for organic produce, you and your friends are famished. You’re in luck, because a welcoming meal is grown only 50 yards from the farm’s glass-encased restaurant delivering family-style, seasonal specialties and panoramic views. This is the experience guests can expect at Granor Farm, a certified organic food farm committed to respecting the land and community it serves. While the story of the farm began in 2006, the tale of the greenhouse’s unique lighting design by Lux Populi began in 2018, and both stories—intertwined like roots—are continuously evolving.
“This is one of those great ‘relationship’ projects—we’d designed several projects for the owners Rob Buono and Liz Cicchelli, and we’d worked with Wheeler Kearns Architects over many years, so we were a natural fit,” said Lux Populi Director Thomas Paterson. “Plus, it’s the kind of project we love—pure craft thinking. We had so much trust with the client that when we met for the ‘concept presentation,’ I didn’t bring any materials, just a few words. ‘We’re going to create four pads of light in the space with four grids of downlights, perfectly tuned to each function, warm and cool.’ That was it.”
And that is it—an IES Award of Merit-earning lighting scheme as simple as the greens growing on the farmland. No decorative lighting, no details: just enough light to meet the client’s needs.
The lighting scheme includes four aesthetically industrial light pads with grids of hyperbolic downlight cylinders, two in the dining area and two in the adjacent greenhouse. During brighter hours, warm-dimming light pads in the dining area provide 20 footcandles (fc) at 3000K, while the same cylinders with different chips deliver 50 fc at 4000K in a cold-green tone above the vegetable grow areas.
“The color-temperature contrast between the four pads is really the vivid impact and narrative of the space—that is the emotional core of the project. Few projects are so dependent on CCT for their function,” explained Paterson. “The selection was simple—expressing the sense of a classy restaurant solely through tones of candlelight, and of the vibrancy of farm life through the crispness of vibrant greens under cold-white light.”
Once night falls, illumination dims to operate at 3 fc, and eventually 1 fc at 2000K, allowing the natural darkness outside to seamlessly wrap around the intimate dining room, drawing visitors’ eyes to the open-style kitchen as well as the people surrounding them. LED projectors provide 100 fc of 3000K illumination in food preparation areas, while minimal Birchwood strip lights in the kitchen and bathrooms, as well as small path lights by Hevilite add to the wayfinding and overall functionality of the space. Though designers followed the Michigan Energy Code, there was no need for the team to analyze the final project in detail: the sparse design comes in with an LPD below 0.3 watts per sq ft.
Though the final product is one of straightforwardness, it required mitigating the inherent challenge of electric light inside glass walls. Paterson noted, “We wanted the space to simply work and feel right without anyone ever thinking of the lighting. Late at night, the greenhouse is in the pitch-black countryside. The client wanted to keep the landscape dark, so the function of the glass was everything. To make this work, it was critical that reflections in the glass were minimized. The use of the hyperbolic downlight optics eliminated their reflection in the ceiling.”
“More challenging was how to eliminate other reflections. By keeping all light off vertical surfaces—except a little at the cooking station where the downlight grid is allowed to overlap with the worklight—[we were able to ensure that the] structure within the greenhouse does not reflect on the glass. Finally, no vertical elements were lit in the space, so the only reflection seen is of the floor and the tables of the restaurant.”
The effort to minimize glare and reflections on the glass walls led to the determination that the project, rooted in natural wonders, needed no special adornment such as chandeliers or fancy architectural illumination. Aside from four PAR30 LED PARcans lighting a display of historical industrial hose tips, “the decoration is how we light the people, the food, and the experience,” said Paterson.
As twilight settles over the fields of Granor, the greenhouse glows amidst the Michigan terrain. Here, light is a companion to the harvest and the hands that prepare it. The design allows the food, people, and land to tell their stores. In this place of cultivated simplicity each meal becomes a meditation, and every shadow a reminder that beauty can bloom in restraint.
the Designers | Thomas Paterson, Member IES, is the director of Lux Populi.
Esteban Anaya, Member IES, is a lighting designer with Lux Populi.
Ivan Gonzalez is a lighting designer with Lux Populi.