What Control's Brutalist Offices Teach About Uplighting

Last winter I was called to a living room where the owner had spent a lot of money on four beautiful brass uplighters. The room still felt like a cave at nine in the evening. She had read that uplighting makes a ceiling feel higher and softens a room, which is true. What nobody had mentioned was that she had painted her ceiling a deep forest green the summer before.

I ended up explaining the problem with a video game. Control, the 2019 game from Remedy Entertainment, is set inside a vast brutalist office building called the Oldest House, and it is one of the best lit interiors I have seen on a screen. It is also, if you look at it as a lighting designer, a long lesson in what happens when light hits concrete. Here is what I pointed out to her, and what changed in her room afterwards.

What the Oldest House does with light

Most of Control takes place in huge rooms of raw, board marked concrete. The ceilings are high, often five or six times a person's height, and the surfaces are grey and slightly rough. Remedy's artists faced a real problem: concrete swallows light. So they lit the place from hidden sources, cove strips tucked into ceiling recesses, uplights along the base of walls, glowing panels in office partitions, and they let that light bounce.

The game's engine models that bounce carefully. On a capable graphics card with ray tracing turned on, you can watch light from a desk lamp reflect off a polished floor and pick out the edge of the concrete wall behind it. Turn ray tracing off and the same rooms look noticeably flatter, because the cheaper method cannot carry as much of the bounced light around the room.

The most memorable lighting in the game, though, is the red. When the hostile force called the Hiss takes over an area, the rooms are flooded with deep red light. It is unsettling partly because red light on grey concrete looks dim and heavy. Your eyes are far less sensitive to deep red than to yellow green, so a lot of watts produce very little perceived brightness. The designers are using that on purpose.

Why uplighting depends on the ceiling, not the lamp

An uplighter does not light a room directly. It lights the ceiling, and the ceiling lights the room. That means the ceiling is effectively part of the fixture. Its colour and finish decide how much of the lamp's light comes back down.

Paint makers publish a number for this called light reflectance value, usually shortened to LRV, on a scale from 0 for pure black to 100 for a perfect white. The numbers below are typical values from paint charts I keep in my van, and finishes vary, but the spread is what matters.

Those lumen figures are rough first bounce estimates. Light keeps bouncing off walls and floor, so the real number in a room is a bit higher, but the ratio holds. My client's forest green ceiling, at around LRV 12, was sending back roughly one sixth of what a white ceiling would. Her four uplighters were giving the effect of less than one.

This is why Control's designers needed so many hidden sources. On grey concrete, you need several times the light output to get the same feeling of brightness you would get from a white plastered ceiling.

The advice I disagree with

A lot of interior writing says that a dark ceiling makes a room cosy and intimate, and that you can simply "add more lamps." The first part is often true. A dark ceiling can be lovely. The second part is where people get into trouble, because more uplighters on a dark ceiling mostly produce bright circles of colour above each lamp and very little useful light below.

If you love a dark ceiling, I would light the room differently instead of fighting it. Point the light at the walls, which are usually paler, using wall washers or picture lights. Use table lamps with fabric shades to put light at seated eye level. And keep the uplighting for one gesture, maybe a single torchiere in a corner to graze a plant or a texture. That is close to what Control does in its darker spaces: it lights the walls and objects, and lets the ceiling recede into gloom.

For anyone building up light in a room from scratch, layering light in a living room walks through the order I usually follow.

Smaller details the game gets right

Three things I noticed while playing that translate straight into a home.

Distance from the ceiling

The cove lights in the Oldest House sit well below the ceiling plane, so the light fans out before it hits the surface. At home, an uplighter's top should be at least 45 centimetres below the ceiling, and further is better. Closer than that, you get a hot, bright ring right above the lamp instead of a soft wash. In a room with a 2.4 metre ceiling, a tall torchiere is often too close. Many rooms with standard ceilings simply suit wall lights better.

Warm light on cold surfaces

The office areas in Control are lit warmer than the concrete would suggest, which keeps them from feeling clinical. A 2700K lamp on a grey ceiling reads as calm. A 4000K lamp on the same surface can feel like a car park. I go through the trade offs in how colour temperature changes a room.

What happened to the green ceiling

We kept the green. She loved it, and I would not ask anyone to repaint for my convenience. We moved two of the brass uplighters into the bedroom, which has a white ceiling, and they look wonderful there. In the living room we added three picture lights over a long bookcase and two shaded table lamps at the sofa ends. The total wattage went down. The room feels about twice as bright.

If you have uplighters at home, try this tonight: turn everything else off, switch on only the uplighter, and look at the ceiling directly above it. If you can see a bright disc with hard edges, the lamp is too close. If the whole ceiling is barely glowing, check the paint colour against its LRV, which most paint brands print on the tin or the website. Under about 50, start pointing light at your walls instead. More from the same angle lives in the games section.