Skins Cosmetics

Since 2000 Skins Cosmetics offers a range of products of international brands in the product field of skin care, parfume and beauty. These brands are available in one of the eight Skins shops spread across the Netherlands and are available in their webshop. Skins Cosmetics also distributes world famous brands in The Netherlands which previously were not available. Some of these brands are Diptyque, Dr.Brandt, Creed, Laura Mercier and Ren Skincare. Their latest shop is situated in the Conservatorium hotel (Architect: Piero Lissoni http://www.conservatoriumhotel.com/about-the-hotel in Amsterdam. Interior designer Roy de Scheemaker contacted me to create the lighting design plan for the new Skins shop. First of all I had to take into the consideration that this is a very old building, with its own characteristics and personality. The place where the Skins shop is situated is facing the street side and it has huge windows with a lot of daylight coming in. The big influence of daylight is that it makes everything look ‘flat’, this makes it more difficult from a light technical point of view. My goal is to create a nice atmosphere with deep contrasts and effects. To achieve this we decided to paint the ceiling black. Because the ceiling is black a bigger contrast between light and dark is created. A dark color ceiling is usually used to camouflage the height of the ceiling, but we wanted to keep the feeling of the height by using chandeliers which are directly mounted to the ceiling. These chandeliers are designed by me especially for this project. This design is done in cooperation with the Italian company Fabbian and their product line glass “Tile”. My idea to use the Tile in this format was to give the space a special effect of a ‘fresh, sparkling, luxiourious and clean’ atmosphere. The special detail of this chandelier is that the frame of the chandelier “dissolves” randomly into a single Tile. To create the sparkling detail of this chandelier I have located the lighting sources inside the edges of the chandelier (20x LED lights in daylight color temperature). The back of the presentation walls are made of opal glass with LED light behind it. The basic and accent light is created by the use of tracks which are mounted on the ceiling. Aiming the downlights on these tracks gives the possibility to accentuate the front of the products which in combination with the backlight of the opal glass wall gives a beautiful luxurious effect. The brightness of the downlight is a 35W CDM-CT. The shop window has been lighted with tracklight 70W small bundle +/- 15 degrees lightsource as a concurrent to the daylight. We did not use Halogen lights in this projects because we wanted to use high efficiency energy saving light sources.