Farringdon Apartment

Gira KNX lighting control for an apartment in a former loading bay in the City of London: engraved matte black keypads, the Gira Smart Home App and secure remote access, designed so the technology serves the architecture rather than competing with it.

Tucked into a former loading bay in the heart of the City, this Farringdon apartment wears its industrial past lightly: high ceilings, full-height glazing, steel-framed glass partitions and a warm palette of cream and timber, held together by strong black architectural detail. The brief was to bring intelligent lighting control into that composition without disturbing it.

We built the control on a Gira KNX backbone, programmed around how the apartment is actually lived in. In the open-plan living space the lighting is zoned twice over, by area and by fitting type, so the pendants can fall away to something softer for dinner while task lighting stays crisp for working. Because the intelligence lives in the programming rather than the hardware, functions can be refined and regrouped as routines change, without touching the walls.

The control points were chosen as pieces of the interior. Matte black Gira Pushbutton Sensor 4 keypads, four-gang and three-gang on the same 95mm square footprint, put up to eight functions behind a single plate, every rocker engraved with text and icons. On the exposed conduit runs beside the bed, we fitted the keypads into custom flush-mounted boxes so the technology traces the architecture instead of interrupting it.

Alongside the keypads, the Gira Smart Home App puts the whole lighting system on the owners' phones, and a Gira S1 adds secure remote access for when they're away: tactile, digital and remote control of one intelligent system.