Games Room and Gym, Waterhouse Gardens, Manchester

Waterhouse Gardens, Manchester: Gym and Games Room

Ricoman designed and supplied the lighting for the gym and games room at Waterhouse Gardens, a residential development in Manchester, working alongside Studio Power, Domis Construction and Matic Building Services.

Waterhouse Gardens is a development of 556 apartments, duplexes and penthouses on the former Boddingtons Brewery site, and the gym and games room sit within the Waterhouse Club, the residents’ amenity suite.

Lighting For Amenity Spaces

Amenity spaces are part of the reason someone chooses one building over another, so they need to feel like a feature rather than a room that has just been made bright enough to use. The brief for the gym and games room at Waterhouse Gardens asked for something fun and creative that still worked hard as functional lighting, and the scheme was designed and manufactured to suit both rooms.

Both rooms are dark by design. Deep blue panelling in the games room, a black ceiling in the gym. Dark surfaces absorb light rather than bouncing it back, so very little of the useful light in either space arrives second hand off a wall or ceiling. Almost all of it has to come straight from the luminaire, which makes the position and the output of every run a decision rather than a detail.

Games Room Lighting: A Suspended Flow+ Grid

The centrepiece is a customised Flow+ grid, suspended as a single rectangular lattice below the coffered ceiling. It reads as an installation rather than a light fitting, which is exactly what the room needed.

It also solves a real problem. A games room has several activity zones at once: a pool table, a shuffleboard, a foosball table, arcade machines and a seating area. A single pendant over the pool table would light one of those well and leave the rest in shadow. Spreading the light across a grid gives even coverage over the whole floor, so every table is properly lit and players are not casting shadows across their own shot.

Black Modus surface mounted downlights sit alongside it, finished to disappear into the dark ceiling while adding light where the grid does not reach. The warm colour temperature throughout keeps the room feeling social rather than clinical.

Gym Lighting Design For A Dark Ceiling

The gym uses Flow+ in continuous straight runs instead, set along the length of the room and following the equipment layout rather than cutting across it. Light lands where people are training and along the central walkway, and the long unbroken lines give the black ceiling a sense of direction.

Glare matters more in a gym than in most spaces, because it is one of the few rooms where people spend real time looking upwards. Anyone on a bench, a mat or a rower has the ceiling in their line of sight. Diffused output along a continuous run avoids the harsh points of light that a row of bare spots would create.

DALI Lighting Control With A Lutron Dimming System

Every luminaire was supplied with DALI control gear. DALI is a control standard that allows each fitting or group of fittings to be dimmed individually rather than switching a whole room at once, and it let the Ricoman luminaires integrate cleanly with the Lutron dimming system running through the development. One set of controls for the building, with no compromise on the fittings that were specified.

For residents it means the gym can run at full output through the morning and the games room can drop to a lower, softer setting for an evening, all from the controls the rest of the building already uses.

Custom LED Lighting, Designed And Made In Manchester

A suspended grid has to be right before it leaves the factory. The runs were worked out from Studio Power’s drawings and manufactured at our Manchester facility to match the setting out, so the sections arrived ready to go up in sequence.

Ricoman’s contribution was led by Liang, and our team stayed involved through the install, on hand for Matic Building Services as the runs went up.