Hospitality · South Florida
Hospitality lighting in South Florida
Guestrooms, corridors, lobbies, back of house and the pool deck. Four different problems that arrive as one package, on a schedule that does not move.
What is different
A hotel is five buildings wearing one roof
A guestroom is residential lighting with commercial durability and a housekeeping cart running into it twice a day. A corridor is life safety and ADA before it is design. A lobby is the only part anybody photographs. Back of house is a code exercise. And in South Florida the pool deck is an exterior corrosion problem that may also sit under a turtle ordinance.
They rarely arrive as five packages. They arrive as one schedule with one deadline, split awkwardly between the FF&E designer and the electrical engineer — and the split is where things go missing. A decorative pendant chosen by FF&E with no driver, no dimming protocol and no mounting detail, landing on an electrical contractor who has already bought the controls.
Where it goes wrong
The four failures I see most
The FF&E and electrical split. Somebody has to own the interface between a fixture chosen for how it looks and a dimming system chosen for how it performs. Get the driver and the protocol agreed at design development, not at rough-in.
Corridors clearing egress and ADA at the same time. Wall-mounted fixtures have a projection limit, emergency lighting has a coverage requirement, and the two constraints tend to be solved by different people on different drawings.
The pool deck. Salt air plus chlorine is harsher than most exterior fixtures are specified for, and a damp-location listing is not a wet-location listing. If the property is oceanfront, add the turtle ordinance on top.
Lead time on decorative. The custom pendant is almost always the item that holds the opening. It needs to be released first and tracked hardest, which is the part of this job I actually do.
Coastal
Oceanfront changes the exterior package
If the property has line of sight to the beach, the exterior — and any interior fixture visible through glazing — falls under the local sea turtle ordinance. The requirement is the city’s, not the county’s, wherever the city has adopted its own. Palm Beach County requires greater than 570 nanometers where the state model says 560, which is enough of a gap to fail a submittal.
Corrosion is the other half. On the deck and the exposed elevations, look at what the manufacturer actually publishes about the finish system rather than the color name — marine-grade low-copper aluminum, stainless hardware, salt spray hours to ASTM B117. Some lines publish it in detail. Most do not.
More on both: the sea turtle lighting page and the coastal lighting guide.
On the card
Lines I quote on hospitality work 22 lines
Common questions
Questions I get asked
Who is the hospitality lighting rep in South Florida?
I am. I cover Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River, Okeechobee and Monroe, and I represent the SESCO lines. Send the schedule or call 786-395-1222.
Can you quote a whole hotel package?
Yes, and it is the better way to do it. Quoting a full schedule at once nearly always prices better than fixture by fixture, and it lets me flag the lead-time problems while there is still time to solve them.
Do you handle the FF&E fixtures as well as the electrical ones?
I quote what is on my line card either way. The more useful thing I do is own the interface between them — making sure the decorative fixture the designer picked has a driver and a dimming protocol that match the controls the engineer specified.
What is different about an oceanfront hotel?
Two things. The exterior and anything visible through glazing falls under the local sea turtle ordinance, which varies by city. And salt air plus pool chemistry is a corrosion problem that a damp-location fixture will not survive.
Next step
Send the schedule
Send the fixture schedule, the FF&E book, or a marked-up reflected ceiling plan. No charge for a takeoff, and quoting the whole package at once nearly always prices better than going type by type — it also lets me flag the two or three items that will hold your opening before they do.
Ask about a hotel package · See the full line card · How I run a job