Gary Skone contacted us in the middle of last summer about a “small bathroom project”. Well, the bathroom itself was small, but there was no lack of imagination or creativity on Gary’s part, with fibres used in wide range of effects.
In addition to a conventional star ceiling, Gary also put “stars” in the wall tiles and used fibres to illuminate glass floor tiles. Rather than hide the fibres running down the wall from the light source in the loft, Gary put the glowing fibres inside an acrylic tube to create an extra decorative lighting feature. “There are 215 star points in the ceiling and around 300 in the walls, plus 60 lighting the floor tiles and 24 assorted spares lighting the niche in the wall,” says Gary. To accommodate the large number of fibres he used a MiniLED600 light source which has two LEDs and can take twice as many fibres as our standard MiniLED550.
Some more photos of Gary’s impressive project, which show off the floor tiles to better advantage and also show the glowing column of fibres in context. Also seen for the first time are the two horizontal lines which he created by recessing 3mm solid core sideglow light guide in the grout lines between wall tiles.
You’ll notice that the “stars” in the wall tiles are always a different colour to the glass tiles in the floor. This is because of a peculiar feature of the MiniLED600 light source. Although it has two LEDs and so is capable of illuminating two separate fibre harnesses, it has just one colour wheel. This is divided into 6 segments and as it rotates it changes the colour of the light entering each harness. So while – for instance there might be white light in one harness there would be yellow in the other because of the geometry of the colour wheel.
There is a very clear separation of the two harnesses in the room, with one exception – a small spiral effect in the star ceiling which combines fibres from both harnesses and thus shows two colours in the same area.
Detail of the fibre cables flat to the wall before the next line of tiles are applied.
Four fibre optic cables form the ‘filament’ for lighting the glass tile.
