Today I went to visit another luxury boutique hotel, Malmaison Dundee. Having previously stayed there I already knew how the lighting systems in the room looked like. Unfortunately not great…

The first thing I did when I met with Barry, the manager, was to emphasise the bad reviews I read on TripAdvisor under the keyboard #light. Here there are some:

• The room was a bit dark, however, so difficult to get a good light to do my hair (vitally important!).
• Room very dark, I know this is part of the ambience, but with all lights on you struggle to read a paper.
• Only one small glitch and that was lighting would have loved a brighter light in the bathroom for applying makeup etc.
• Trying to do my hair and makeup in the room was a bit of a nightmare even if I sat next to the window and had all of the lights on.
• I know there is a theme but at 9 am in the morning we needed every light on and this still wasn’t very bright.
• Our room was nice (bit dark/an extra light wouldn’t go wrong).
• Rooms: dark, and at my age, I need better light!!
• The lights in my room were broken!

After that my first note, Barry said Malmaison Dundee was the latest hotel of the chain to have been built, therefore it will end up being the last one to get the new lighting systems he said they’re going to adopt in all other hotels. Whether that was the truth or not I don’t know..

Anyway, after the negative moment of the conversation, we started talking about some improvements he thought might be good to implement in future luxury hotel lamps. These are:

• USB charging: good point mentioning that nowadays it would be very useful to have a bedside table lamp that would easily charge your phone, too.
• easy maintenance: the lamp should be easy to maintain. For example, if the bulb went out it shouldn’t be that difficult to replace.
• space on the table: it should take up so much space on the bedside table, otherwise the guests wouldn’t have any space for leaving other stuff there.
• easy to control: one of the most important aspects, it must be easy to use whatever system I will decide to adopt.
• different ambience: if possible, it would be nice to have the possibility to change the atmosphere/colour of the room based on the occasion (reading, watching a film, relaxing, partying, etc).

Although the meeting with Barry was quite a short interview, it was amazing the insights he gave me about possible lighting solutions for luxury hotels. He used a lot the word easy, essential for design. GO EASY.