Martos Residence
ResidentialQuezon City
Architectural lighting design, specification, supply and commissioning. Manila, since 2014.
Move to light the roomIlluminance, colour rendering and efficiency are the entry fee. What decides a room is how people read it — so we start from the building, its form, its materials, its rhythm, and layer ambient, accent and architectural light against it until the space has depth and hierarchy.
The goal is never brightness. It is clarity, balance and comfort. Light reveals architecture, enhances materials and defines atmosphere; done properly it is the one element in the room nobody mentions.
That means staying past the drawing set. We hold the intent through specification, supply, control programming and commissioning — the stages where most lighting concepts quietly get lost.
Lighting here was never a layer applied afterward. Every decision started from the bamboo pavilion itself — its form, its material, its rhythm — and from the landscape it sits in.
Warm uplighting at the base of the clustered columns sets a vertical cadence that reads from across the water and up close. Soft grazing from concealed fixtures reveals the handcrafted roof without erasing the shadow that gives it texture.
Along the bridge, recessed floor lights and concealed grazers trace path and canopy, mirrored in the lake. The result binds the composition rather than competing with it.
Schemes in design, visualisation and technical study. Nothing here is built yet — these are the studies where the lighting argument gets settled before anyone orders a fixture.
Concept, schematic and detailed design developed against the architecture, with mock-ups where it matters.
Calculations, fixture schedules, control schematics and drawings a contractor can actually build from.
Sourcing through a curated network of architectural brands, so what gets installed is what was specified.
Automation, scene programming, focusing and aiming — the stage that decides whether any of the rest worked.
Fifteen years across residential, hospitality, retail and civic work, beginning with Black Bird at Nielsen Tower and Old Manila at The Peninsula. He started out supplying fixtures and kept meeting rooms that hit every technical standard and still felt harsh — which sent him to Wismar for a master's, and to the Paul Klee line the studio still works by: one eye sees, the other feels.
Two fixtures can share a datasheet and behave nothing alike on a wall. Beam angle, colour temperature, glare and the way light falls across a real material only declare themselves in a room — so we built one you can stand in before anything is ordered.
2nd Floor, 93 Araullo
San Juan City, 1500
Metro Manila
Photometric data will not tell you how a room is going to feel. The Experience Center is where that gets settled — beam angles landing on real surfaces, colour temperature judged against the material you actually specified, and control scenes run end to end before anything is committed to a drawing.
2nd Floor, 93 Araullo
San Juan City
1500 Metro Manila