How to light office meeting and breakout rooms

When it comes to office lighting, meeting rooms and breakout areas need special attention. They need to be functional for lots of tasks, for face-to-face meetings, people taking notes and for presentations. And they must also create the right ambience for customers and other guests.

Lighting levels for a meeting room

Effective lighting is essential for communication. CIBSE suggests an illuminance level of 500 lux, because people could be studying paperwork, and a uniform glare rating of 19 or less if they need to concentrate on a screen.

Lighting control

And because people use the room for different tasks, dimmable lighting or even scene setting allows occupants to change light levels to meet their needs.

Choosing the right luminaires

Matching the right ambient lighting with task and feature lighting means that you will need to specify a variety of different luminaires.

You will need higher output luminaires over the conference table to help people focus, wall washers to light display boards and artwork and recessed spotlights to help create a relaxing informal impression.

And because visitors will be in a meeting room, make sure that you specify good quality fittings to make the right impression.

Break out areas

Some communal areas are meant to be more informal for staff to relax in. For these areas you should consider a combination of ambient and task lighting to help create an inviting atmosphere. Soft diffused lighting helps achieve this.

Just like the more formal meeting room, adjustable lighting control gives some flexibility in how people want to use these spaces. They may want an informal meeting, to socialise or read for instance.

While general office areas and meeting rooms may want a cooler correlated colour temperature of 4000K to aid concentration, consider using a slightly warmer CCT of 3000K for these spaces. We would also suggest reducing the illuminance levels to 200 lux but supplement the lighting with freestanding or table lamps for specific tasks.

Office Lighting Guide

In any office block you will need to design and install lighting for different rooms and areas. To find out more about designing lighting schemes for offices and the different lighting needs for each room or space, download a copy of our Better Lighting for Offices Specification Guide.