Give the architects at Rockwell Group a giant box of crayons and you'll get a colorful interior. Add multilayered lighting by Focus Lighting and you'll get Crayola, a retail store and studio in Arundel Mills Mall in Baltimore, MD. "The idea was to make the store an interesting and interactive space to showcase Crayola's products," says Sepp Spenlinhauer, of Eclectic Precision, who served as senior lighting designer for the project, working with Focus Lighting principal Paul Gregory and assistant designer Christine Caracciolo.

Take a client whose main products are crayons and markers, and it's only natural that color should be a prime player in the design scheme. "We collaborated with Rockwell Group to conceive an interior that exploited color in every way we could think of," says Spenlinhauer. So, color it is, with a meandering River of Color, a 200'-long, 4'-wide path of 11 vibrantly colored floor tiles, winding around the store (above). A pendant-mounted track system with flexible connectors centered over the river was used to provide the correct location to light the river and the end caps of the merchandise units. Focus Lighting worked with Times Square Lighting to modify standard fixtures for use with a 100W narrow-spot reflector and an integral 6" snoot/color holder.

"In order to maintain the open, inviting feeling, most of the lighting was at 16' [above finished floor] or higher," says Spenlinhauer. "This presented a challenge with the high light levels required by the retail space and the need to allow the colored surfaces to glow with vibrancy. To make it all work, a tightly-controlled system to light the merchandise was required." Times Square track heads with narrow-spot 70W CMH PAR-30 lamps, with 4" snoots and lenses, highlight the rolling displays and wall merchandise, while the sloped, floating ceilings have custom RSA three-head fixtures, with 70W CMH PAR-30 adjustable accents in the two outer heads and a 100W CMH ED17 fixed downlight in the middle head to provide a general wash. Ambient lighting is provided by Prescolite 6" aperture 42W CFL downlight/wall-washers, Spero four-lamp 42W CFL pendant domes, A&L pendant-mounted two-lamp T8 6" squares, and Prudential galvanized two-lamp T8 pendants with linear louvers.

"One of the bigger design questions for this very colorful interior was, 'What is the backdrop?'" asks Spenlinhauer. "During design development the vertical wall was a very pale purple-white from the floor up to 18', a medium purple from 18' to 24', and the ceiling a darker purple. We mocked this up and found that the pale purple-white was too high, and the architect agreed to bring the middle-purple color down to 12'. This gave us the opportunity to light 'the wrapper,' providing a visual continuity and 'tie-together' element between the retail space and the studio."

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