Luminary Installation

The lobby of a commercial building is the first impression of every tenant and client that enters. Fola Properties understood the stakes — a standard recessed grid would have wasted the opportunity.

Our design: a suspended steel flat bar grid installed at 2.8m, offset from the structural ceiling by 600mm. Within the grid, 48 individually positioned LED downlights set at varying depths on steel stems — some long, some short — creating a field of light that reads as organised from one angle and deliberately varied from another.

The flat bar grid is welded from 30mm x 6mm mild steel bar in a 400mm module, powder-coated matte black. All electrical wiring runs inside the hollow steel perimeter frame and is completely invisible from below.

We worked with the building’s electrical contractor on the supply side. The installation required a structural fixing survey of the ceiling before any drilling — all load points were calculated and approved.

We visited the Lafia workshop before designing anything. Three days observing their production process, measuring their most common chair frame, identifying the three operations that introduced the most variation: seat rail drilling angle, backleg compound angle cut, and stretcher centreline positioning.

The result: three dedicated jigs. Jig 1 — Seat Rail Drill Guide: steel body, two aluminium registration plates, four fixed drill bushings at 8mm and 10mm for the standard rail cross-section. Jig 2 — Backleg Angle Saw Guide: adjustable steel fence on a heavy base, set at 5° compound taper, referenced from the leg face. Jig 3 — Stretcher Positioning Frame: open steel rectangle at standard stretcher span, self-clamping to the leg pair.

All three jigs were built with replaceable wear components — the drill bushings, the fence face plates, and the clamp faces are all standard-dimension replaceable parts available from any engineering supplier.