Director Jack Pannell Speaking at Clerkenwell Design Week 2026 – the darc thoughts panel

Ahead of a panel at Clerkenwell Design Week hosted by darc thoughts, Common Ground Workshop director Jack Pannell on why lighting in hospitality and mixed-use spaces needs to be planned as long-term infrastructure rather than a finish layer.

Should lighting be designed as decoration, or as infrastructure?

Jack Pannell – Most hospitality lighting still gets briefed as the former: atmosphere, mood, brand expression, the look of a particular moment. That works perfectly well until the operator changes. Or the brand repositions. Or the space gets re-fit for a different concept three years in.

The projects we tend to be brought into at Common Ground Workshop don’t sit still: Hospitality buildings with multiple lives, mixed-use schemes where one occupier follows another, complex urban sites where the brief evolves between RIBA stages. Sometimes change happens through construction, sometimes after handover. That pattern has changed how we think about lighting.

One of our hospitality projects in Nine Elms has now been through three iterations of operator and brand in 6 years. The core lighting infrastructure – circuiting strategy, dimmable zoning, pendant positions, spatial setting-out – has barely changed across any of them. The aesthetic skin has been re-finished each time. The bones have not.

That’s the difference between lighting designed as a moment and lighting designed as infrastructure. The first gets ripped out at every refit, which is expensive, wasteful, and embeds more carbon into a building’s whole-life footprint with every cycle. The second gets reused, adapted, and re-skinned – keeping cost out of the next fit-out and material out of the skip.

It’s not about avoiding atmosphere or aesthetic intent. Some of the most adaptable lighting strategies we’ve delivered are also some of the most distinctive at any given moment. The point is that the underlying infrastructure has been planned to accommodate a future the original brief doesn’t yet describe.

Good lighting should outlast trends and survive change.