Nexo Luce is an Italian company with international vision and appeal. Specialized in the creation of technical lighting fixtures, the firm stands out for the versatility of its way of working, collaborating with external designers and architects or relying on its in-house team, for both residential and contract applications. Nexo Luce also marries the Made in Italy philosophy in all respects by assembling its handcrafted creations in its own production facility in Mantua.
The brand has recently focused on the internal and external lighting of the Grand Millennium Hotel (Dubai, United Arab Emirates): a 5-star facility with 251 rooms. The high point of the project is the 14-meter chandelier in Murano glass, extending across three levels of the main hall of the hotel. We talked about this and much more with Anna Kraskovskaya, Marketing Manager of the company.
Grand Millennium Hotel
What is the significance of the Middle Eastern market for Nexo Luce?
The overall outlook for the Middle East growth in tourism and hospitality sectors remains positive. Among the GCC countries, analysts say that the UAE continue to show the highest growth potential with the upcoming Expo 2020 expected to welcome an international audience of 25 million visitors. The above outlook gives Nexo Luce the potential to target large-scale hospitality and residential projects in the region, which still has remained our main focus throughout the years.
Grand Millennium Hotel
What are the added values brought by Nexo Luce to the Grand Millennium Hotel?
Nexo Luce provided both exterior and interior lighting for the project. The exterior lighting covered the hotel four facades highlighting its architectural details as well as the landscape, public pathways, pool decks and car park ramp. The interior lighting covered technical and decorative lighting including public spaces, lobby, F&B outlets, ballroom, meeting rooms, gym and spa, back-of-house areas, suites, guestrooms corridors, and bar areas. Overall Nexo Luce undertook the whole project and played not only the role of a lighting supplier but also a lighting expert and project managed the whole lot turnkey from a lighting perspective (including concept, design and delivery of standard and custom-made products).
Grand Millennium Hotel
Are your projects carried out through collaborations, or with in-house designers and producers?
One of Nexo Luce’s added values is its flexibility. Hence, depending on the case, we collaborate closely with architects/designers to meet their objectives and/or we have our internal design team who may assist as and when required.
Grand Millennium Hotel
What are the main difficulties encountered in projects like the entrance to the Grand Millennium Hotel, where the ceiling has a height of almost 18 meters? What are the characteristics of the chandelier?
The main challenge was to design an exceptional lighting sculpture. Our Italian architects had to fly to Dubai and meet with the client to understand his vision. Over a week’s time, they designed a number of options until they finalised in a consultative way with the client the actual chandelier of 14 metre Murano glass that spans three floors of the hotel main lobby and that is composed of seven structured cage clusters, made of steel wires and covered by a total of 140 individually crafted amber glass leaves. The shape of the leaves is realized in four types which allows to assemble them outside the cluster, while the light sources are suspended inside of it. Venetian craftsmen had a challenging task to create every glass leaf by hand following a strict design pattern and to ensure the leaves for each type are the same. It took 10 days for the technical team of Nexo Luce to install the chandelier and carefully assemble the glass leaves by hand, while carrying out the works on different heights of the hotel lobby.
For the Grand Millennium Hotel, have you used catalogue products or custom pieces?
In total the external lighting plan includes more than 500 light fixtures. While the internal spaces contain more than 2000 technical luminaries that range from architectural to technical products used to either provide the general lighting, accentuate main functional spaces. Most of these pieces were the catalogue products from our 3 brands with few customisation As for the decorative, most of it was custom-made, from simple table lamps to various chandeliers to the large chandeliers in the lobby and ballroom.
Grand Millennium Hotel
What will be the future of your company in terms of growth? On which geographical areas do you plan to concentrate?
Nexo Luce is planning to continue growing its portfolio in the Middle East and other markets which shows particular interest to high-end Italian lighting, such as Russia, Europe, USA.
