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From the all-natural ingredients used in the food to the hemp fabric furniture and organic cotton uniforms worn by the staff, every detail of AKASHA—a five-star restaurant, bar and bakery in Culver City, CA—was developed to be as organic, green and sustainable as possible. It’s no surprise, then, that the lighting follows suit.
Owner Akasha Richmond required that all suppliers for the restaurant share her values with regard to the environment. “I want my customers to know that everything they see in AKASHA was selected for a reason,” she says. The project is unique in another way as well: the entire building process was filmed with a full camera crew watching at all times for TLC’s reality show Flip That Restaurant.
 Such high expectations required a highly collaborative effort. Light Group, GE Consumer & Industrial, Preen Inc. (architect and interior designer) and Janmar Lighting (a fixture manufacturer that specializes in creating lighting solutions with the look of incandescent) joined forces to develop a design focused on using innovative technologies in new and unique applications. This approach not only defies traditional beliefs about restaurant lighting, but also offers AKASHA a total savings of more than $5,000 per year by reducing its energy consumption.
BREAKING WITH TRADITION
 Typically, restaurant lighting uses halogen and MR16 lamps to produce a warm and inviting atmosphere with high quality and a precise distribution of light. However, for the 5,400-sq ft AKASHA, only low-energy lighting technologies such as LED, ceramic metal halide (CMH) and fluorescent were acceptable. John Barlow (Light Group) was confident that even though CMH is rarely incorporated into restaurant design, it could be used here as the primary light source.
Using predominantly mono-point and recessed 20-W CMH and dimmable 18-W triple-tube CFLs (from GE Consumer & Industrial), the team was able to create a solution that still offers exceptional light quality and atmosphere. Using CMH was not without challenges, however. “It is much more difficult to create different moods, and compensate for more or less ambient light with sources that do not dim,” explains Barlow. However, by adding a halogen color filter and hexel louver to warm and soften the light, a dimmed effect was created without actually dimming the source. The result was an energy-efficient lighting system that maintained a warm incandescent look and feel with high visual drama.
“Incandescent sources are still in peoples’ comfort zone,” explains Barlow. “We have been around the warm incandescent color of light since the early days of using fire as a primary light source. In a restaurant or bar application, we must enhance the colors of food on the plate, as well as the skin tones of the person or people in front of you. The warmer incandescent-like sources bring life to things with hues of red, amber, whites and most skin tones. No one wants to eat a blue steak, or become closer to a pale sickly person sitting around you. If you look good, you feel good. If a place makes you feel good, you spend money and want to come back again,” he says.
Though, historically, metal halide sources have not had an ideal color quality for the restaurant industry, this is beginning to change, according to Barlow. “We used CMH to build the ‘skeleton’ or bones of the building and environment. We used the source only as indirect accent lighting, and we worked very closely with the interior designer in regard to the colors that the CMH sources were lighting.” Designers worked together to determine the refractive and absorption qualities of the color and how it would affect the overall space. The CMH products selected had a smaller aperture fixture with excellent thermal management. Because of the fixtures’ ability to shed heat from the lamp and ballast, the light maintains its color temperature and promotes maximum life of both the lamp and ballast.
A SIDE OF LEDs
Since the restaurant is in a building dating back to 1925, the lighting was arranged to accentuate the lines of the older building and—through the use of many sources—to enhance the raw surfaces of the space. “By using higher contrast light techniques, we were able to highlight the building’s attributes, while at the same time downplay its flaws,” says Barlow.
LEDs were used for task lighting—pin spots over each table, shelf illumination and behind-the-bar lighting. Barlow worked with Light Integration (Longwood, FL) to build or find the most appropriate dimmable linear LED strips and create the illuminated logo in the concrete entry floor. Prima Lighting (Sante Fe Springs, CA) was involved in the layout and intricacies of the dimmable 2-W-per-head LED mono-line used for the pin spots on each of the tables throughout.
Outside, building accent and landscape lighting were provided via 3-W LED sources (from Dreamscape Lighting). LEDs were used in the archways of the building as uplights, in the exterior patio area for general lighting and as wall-mounted exterior accent spots.
The restaurant’s back wall presented a unique challenge. The wall is covered in old barn siding and offers the main food pick-up line for the servers. Designers selected dimmable T5HO seamless linear lensed strips (from Dreamscape) mounted horizontally behind the pony wall that had booths on the opposite side. This lighting provided not only an even wash of light to the back wall from a low level, but also doubled as a task light for the servers’ condiment shelf directly below the fixtures.
The very low level ambient fill lighting and clean-up lights are also recessed and cylinder-mount 18-W dimmable fluorescent with an incandescent lens (from Janmar). All of the decorative fixtures used (most from Fontana Arte of Italy) came with medium-base incandescent sockets, which were retrofitted with screw-in cold cathode dimmable A-lamp type bulbs.
THE PAYOFF
AKASHA’s focus on the environment is paying off. All fixtures have low energy consumption and long lamp life, and all—with the exception of the few decorative fixtures—were built within a 30-mile radius of the project, which in itself lends to the green nature of the project.
As a result, the restaurant is realizing significant savings in total energy costs. It is has been estimated that the 20-W CMH lamps are reducing overall energy consumption by approximately 77 percent when compared with a standard design using MR16 and halogen-lamped fixtures. The shortest expected lamp life of any of the fixtures is 12,000 hours, from the CMH as well as the CFL. The use of sources not traditionally found in a restaurant just goes to show that anything is possible. The proof is in the pudding—or in the case of AKASHA, the chocolate-hemp gelato.
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