Maslow's Kensington
Lighting is not just
Lighting is not just
about the fitting.
It is about the atmosphere.
A working-wellness members' house — from first light to last order.
A working-wellness members' house — from first light to last order.
We treat lighting the way we treat any other material — chosen for how it makes a room feel, not simply for what it does. At Maslow's Kensington, every feature fitting was specified as part of an atmosphere.
The Kensington Building has extraordinary natural assets: double-height, floor-to-ceiling windows in its principal spaces, where light is given room to lead. Where the building gives freely, we stepped back. Where the deep floor plates meant daylight could not reach — rooms without windows, corridors in perpetual interior dusk, the gym below the principal levels — we placed feature lighting to give those spaces movement, warmth, and a reason to exist.
Our role was the feature layer: table lamps, wall lights, picture lights, pendants, floor lamps, and a run of bespoke commissions. The fittings were drawn from a mix of retail, vintage, commercial, and custom sources — assembled until the combination felt earned rather than installed. Elektra Lighting consulted on and oversaw the wider scheme; Thirdway carried the fit-out and architectural installation; procurement was handled by Dodds & Shute. The feature schedule itself was specified fitting by fitting, tag by tag — every table lamp, wall light, and pendant numbered against the Dodds & Shute schedule, the final approved lighting document.
The building's architecture does the first job. Where the principal spaces have height and glass, light arrives with a quality no fitting can replicate. Our work there was about what happens next — as the day closes.
Feature lighting in those spaces was designed to activate as natural light falls away, so the transition from afternoon to evening is felt rather than noticed. Pendants drop into the volume with deliberate restraint; their warmth becomes present as the sun moves rather than competing with it.
The image alongside is one of the truest captures of how the building feels on a clear afternoon — desks drawn up to the full-height glazing, the warm linear pendants barely registering against the daylight pouring off the red-brick street. That balance is the building at work. Our job was to design something that held its own once the sun moved on.
Before any fitting was specified, we mapped how daylight reaches the building. The plan is wrapped tight by its neighbours — a solid party wall to the north, a close block to the east — so the daylight arrives unevenly. The lighting scheme answers that map: restraint where the sun does the work, presence where it never reaches.
Corridors were designed as pause moments — places that slow you down and give the journey between rooms its own quiet character.
Art was placed along every circulation route, and traditional picture lights were used to bring the eye down and create intimacy at a human scale. The picture light is a simple technology but its effect is precise: it makes a wall feel inhabited, gives a corridor its own small world, and marks the building as a place where nothing has been left to default.
Some floors were drenched in deep colour — dark joinery, burgundy curtain, plum wall — creating a lighting condition that had to be worked with rather than averaged out. The same warm temperature reads differently against a deep surface. That contrast was designed in.
Light is what turns a room
from a drawing into
a destination.
Some of the wall lights at Maslow's Kensington were chosen as much for their materiality as for the quality of light they cast. An alabaster sconce glows differently from an opal globe. A smoked oak armature casts a different shadow from polished brass.
These pieces were not accessories placed into a finished room. They were selected for how light interacts with the surface behind them — how a warm globe pressing against dark walnut joinery creates warmth you feel before you identify its source, or how a stepped alabaster shade against oak-grained panelling reads as a jewel set against a considered ground.
Where nothing answered the brief, we designed to drawing. The bespoke run was built in a tight material vocabulary — oak timber, aged and antique bronze, opal and frosted off-white glass — so that custom pieces sat as quietly as the specified ones. The living-room wall light and the booth sconce were drawn in oak with opal-glass bulbs; the picture and pendant fittings carried bronze. The mix of forms — globes, torchieres, stepped alabaster, horizontal bars — was intentional. Each distributes light differently and has its own relationship with shadow. Together they give the building texture without uniformity.
A handful of fittings were commissioned to drawing — designed where the room asked for something the market could not supply, and detailed so the light stayed soft and the object stayed discreet.
A turned-timber drop descending the stairwell, its bulbs at eye level on the mezzanine — finished to diffuse a soft, natural light. Decorative, never blinding.
Smoked-glass drops on an antique-bronze structure, scaled up for the volume of the entrance and coordinated with the exposed ceiling raft.
A floor-to-ceiling pendant in oak with bronze metalwork and frosted glass, hung to sit with the glazing and centred on the fireplace joinery.
A desk lamp for the pied-à-terre library — a linen shade on a bronze stem, base matched to the desk timber, removable by the house team.
The warmth of a considered room. 2700K is the temperature at which a space begins to feel inhabited rather than operated. Every wall light and pendant was held to this standard — so the architectural and feature layers read as one continuous warmth.
The difference between 2700K and 2200K is the difference between a room feeling well-lit and a room feeling genuinely intimate. Table and floor lamps at 2200K shift the atmosphere from working to dwelling as the day closes — without a scene being reprogrammed.
Paint was not simply a colour decision. The finish of a wall determines what light does once it lands — how it reflects, how it moves, how far it carries into the room.
In the gym, a two-tone treatment was chosen for exactly this quality. The polished upper band lifts and spreads the linear light overhead, while the deeper register below grounds the space and gives the directional fittings a surface to read against. Mirror and glass extend the effect, bouncing the light back across the floor so a windowless room feels brighter and larger than its footprint — atmosphere built from finish and reflection rather than fixture count.
A room without
natural light needs
a reason to look up.
Reflection was treated as a lighting strategy in its own right — glass and mirror used to move borrowed light deeper into the plan, and to fold the street back into the room.
Seen through the glazed façade, the interior and the red-brick mansion blocks of Kensington occupy the same frame at once — the warm lamplight inside layered over the architecture outside. It is the clearest illustration of how the building works: a hospitality interior that borrows from its surroundings, with reflective surfaces doing the carrying.
The same principle runs through the phone booths, specified in two types — one with a window, one with a mirror standing in for the window where the architecture offered none. The mirror does not imitate the view; it returns light to a space that had no other source of it.
Several spaces sit deep in the plan or below the principal levels — no natural light, sometimes raw structure above. The lighting specification here had to work entirely differently.
With no daylight to set the mood, the feature layer does all of it. A picture light lifts a vivid canvas off a deep olive wall; a table lamp pools warmth across the sideboard; globe pendants hold the centre of the room. Where the structural ceiling sat high, we dropped it — suspending rafts to bring the lighting lower and closer, adding warmth at head height so the room reads as intimate rather than cavernous. Each fitting is doing a specific job — washing, pooling, anchoring — and together they give a windowless meeting room the depth and ease of one with a view. In a room like this, atmosphere is something you build, fitting by fitting.
The lighting was assembled the way we assemble a room — from wherever the right piece existed. The split below is indicative of the approach rather than a precise count.
The best available at each price point, chosen against the character of the room rather than a budget bracket.
Vintage pieces bring what production rarely can: patina, age, and the sense that a fitting has been somewhere before.
Where dimming reliability at hospitality scale was required. Chosen for design quality, not merely function.
Where nothing answered the brief, we designed to drawing. Including pieces carried from earlier Maslow's houses as a deliberate thread of continuity.
The feature layer is meant to be seen. The architectural layer is not. Wherever it could, the general and track lighting was specified to match the ceiling paint where it sat — chocolate on chocolate, oyster on oyster — so the light arrived without the fixture announcing itself. On the mezzanine, where the ceiling is finished by a muralist, the fittings were chosen to be painted over entirely: present in the room, invisible on the surface.
From the first conversation about atmosphere to the final fitting position, Mehrai Design led the feature lighting vision for Maslow's Kensington — specifying every table lamp, wall light, pendant, floor lamp, and custom commission in close coordination with Elektra Lighting, Dodds & Shute, and Thirdway.
With thanks to Maslow's for the trust and the collaboration.
Feature lighting specification — fitting selection, custom commissions, positioning and creative direction.
Members' workspace & offices, The Kensington Building, High Street Kensington.
Lighting consultancy and oversight of the general and architectural scheme.
Whole fit-out including architectural lighting installation.
Feature lighting procurement. Certified B Corp.