A newly renovated Starbucks coffee house in Tempe, Arizona, features a new 16-foot cartography-inspired bold mural with flowers in an old-world painting style positioned along the customer seating area. While the mural had a strong use of shape and line with rich colors, the painting needed good quality lighting that would transition it from a backsplash to a focal point in the room.
Richard Antiporda of Canterra Lighting in Scottsdale, Arizona, worked with the Starbucks to find an energy-efficient and low-maintenance alternative to using four 85-watt halogen PAR38 bulbs, which are known to frequently burn out and would leave the mural unlit in large areas; even when fully lit, the PARs would produce sharp lines and bright spots that would distract customers from the artwork.
Starbucks chose to install 16 of MaxLite’s six-watt Plug-and-Play LED Lightbars, installed in a complete circuit around the mural beneath a frame. The cool operating fixtures now provide a balanced glow of warm color that enriches the mood of the mural and draws customers in to view and enjoy.
“Our client was very impressed with the uniform lighting the LED lightbars provided, and they thought it provided superior light to the four spot lights,” says Richard Antiporda, vice president of Sales, Canterra Lighting. “The light has a smooth look to it versus the bright spotlights we were previously using, which had more of a sharp edge of light and burned really hot. They also couldn’t believe how cool the LEDs were, even after being on for several hours.”
The LED fixtures will save the coffee house 78 percent in energy, or 12,200 kWh, and $2,404 in energy and maintenance costs throughout L70-rated the 50,000-hour lifetime of the fixtures, compared with the proposed halogen PAR38 bulbs.
