Drive by a house that has outside lights emphasizing the garage, the landscaping or the windows and chances are the inside lighting presents an equally appealing look for the owners trying to show off a painting, a statue or bookcase.
It's a good bet that a professional lighting designer did the work because they have the expertise to make a house stand out and leave the visitor groping for words to say how much they like the way the house is illuminated.Enter Glenn M. Johnson, principal lighting designer for Spectrum Lighting Design Inc., 175 E. 400 South, and a principal in the parent company, Spectrum Professional Services. SPS also offers electrical, acoustical and audio-visual engineering design for a variety of projects for residential and commercial uses.
The company recently opened offices in San Francisco and Las Vegas and this year will open an office in Phoenix. Besides Johnson, the other principals are Joseph M. Good III, Stewart E. Greene, Dave Wesemann and Gary Koppelmann.
Johnson prefers to call his work illumination rather than lighting because much of the work he does involves illuminating certain areas of a home such as gardens, windows, bookcases, artwork or stairways.
Illumination is an art, he said, and results in the lighting jobs that most homeowner dream of. He talks about the up and down lighting for landscaping, the specialized lighting for stairways, the focused lighting to highlight an expensive piece of art and the subtle lighting to highlight a bookcase or sculpture.
It wasn't long ago that most lighting in a house was designed by an electrician concerned more about providing adequate lighting than highlighting certain aspects of the house. Incandescent bulbs operated by a single toggle switch were popular. Later came fluorescent lights and reflector lamps.
That was followed by track lighting and lights recessed into ceilings. The art of illumination took off in the 1980s when lighting fixtures were designed to take advantage of the small size and high output of tungsten halogen lamps. Dimming devices also became popular to highlight certain areas.
Although Spectrum Lighting Design has only five employees, Johnson said it is the largest and fastest-growing lighting design company in the West. It is doing projects from New York to California.
Since Johnson came to Salt Lake City from California in 1992 and became associated with Spectrum, the company has done 96 lighting projects, and 45 of those are still active. The active ones are in such places as Virginia, New York, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Sun Valley. He also is doing the lighting design for some expensive houses in Salt Lake City, Deer Valley, Park City and Jackson, Wyo.
By using computers, Johnson and his fellow employees create designs and ship them via modems for approval. He said high technology has allowed the firm to remain in Salt Lake City and still conduct its business in far-flung areas.
Although much of Spectrum's work involves estates and houses on the high end of the price scale, Johnson said the company does all sizes of lighting design projects. He said the company charges by the hour to have a designer inspect a house, and it takes two days to complete the drawings on a plan to change a home's lighting.
In addition to designing the lighting, Johnson said today's buzz word is "system integration" that includes lighting and electrical systems to make a house into an "intelligent house" with all kinds of gadgets that will turn on lights or appliances by calling the telephone number.
Johnson is always sharing his lighting design experience in an effort to help residence designers and electricians know more about illumination that will help homeowners get more of what they want.
In May he will be in San Francisco to speak on lighting design and control for high-end residences during Light Fair International and in the same month will travel to Orlando, Fla., for Habitec International to speak on the art of illumination and control design.
Johnson will be in Baltimore, Md., in August to speak to the American Society of Interior Designers on residential custom lighting design. He recently became a corporate member of the International Association of Lighting Designers, a 150-member group of lighting design professionals.
He is the only corporate member of the group from Utah.
Assisting Johnson in his work are Kari L. Mitchell, a Brigham Young University graduate, a lighting designer; Kris Wilde, a University of Utah graduate, an associate lighting designer specializing in historical building and retail store lighting; and Brad Bouch, a UCLA graduate who runs the Las Vegas office.
Johnson didn't come by his interest in lighting design by accident. The Santa Rosa, Calif., native and his two brothers worked for their father, who owned Artistic Lighting Co. The company did some illumination projects in art galleries and residences in various parts of the world.
He formed his own firm, Lighting By Design, and was hired to illuminate homes in the posh areas of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Malibu and Pacific Palisades for movie and television entertainers and directors.
One of his biggest projects was doing three homes for David Geffen, owner of Geffen Records and Films, one of which was a 50,000-square-foot estate in Australia. He was in Australia in the spring of 1992 when the Los Angeles riots broke out, and he feared for the safety of his wife and children.
In June 1992, Johnson talked to Spectrum officials about a job and moved his family to Salt Lake City a month later.