The Magic of Colour
Keukenhof - Netherlands – April 2024
On my way back I could not resist visiting the famous Keukenhof in Lisse, the Netherlands, not far from my mum’s place. It is a huge tourist attraction (Welcome to Keukenhof) branded as the world’s most beautiful spring garden, with the Dutch tulip as its main attraction. Even though I have lived “around the corner” for a big part of my life, I hardly ever visited it. Similar to Parisians hardly ever visiting their own famous Eifel Tower.
We went on an early (cloudy) morning to beat the tourist crowd to allow taking pictures without too many people in it 😊. The inspiration drawn from such visit is no doubt the magic of colour, the mixing and compositions designed by a team of experts. The beauty is further determined and different depending the time of the day (morning sunrise, evening sunset) and whether it is a cloudy or sunny day, let alone rainy, which happens a lot in the Netherlands. You can still see the raindrops on the main tulip in the front.
Validating colours in our job as lighting designer is crucial and elementary I would say. With the wrong lighting we can ruin the beauty of colours very easily. We are privileged that today the LED technology has progressed such that not only we can get very high CRI’s but smart control’s can even colour correct / adapt to make sure colour come out as magically as possible. As a lighting designer it is our duty to make sure that lighting brings out the colours as realistically as possible.
It is however a two-way street. Knowing what we know about how light renders colours we should also be a strategic partner to our design colleagues (the architects and interior designers alike) and advise how lighting will interact colours and vice versa. Don’t just light what is being presented to you, engage with the designers of the environment you are lighting up to get the best possible end result! Properly designed lighting and colour is a magical combination…
