This past summer, we made the move to a new office with a larger warehouse space. We decided to use some of the living office space to create showrooms for our products.
For our ‘retail store’ vignette, we decided to experiment with building our very own slat ceiling. What started as a simple idea ended up turning out a great end product! Here’s why we fell in love with our lights in a slat ceiling.
1. Hide Your Track Lighting System
Track lighting is an easy, affordable way to be versatile with your retail lighting choices. Track lighting systems are frequently used in commercial locations such restaurants, hotels, high-end retail locations and industrial apartments.
When paired with sleek light fixtures, a track system can blend in seamlessly with any environment. But, in some instances, you may want to hide the track itself.
Installing a slat ceiling is one way that you can hide track. Unobtrusive light fixtures will fit through the slats and can still be pointed towards displays as usual.
We used black 2-circuit track installed into a black drop ceiling so that it wouldn’t take away from the ceiling design. It also gives the visual effect that there is no drop ceiling installed underneath at all.
2. Add More Dimension to Your Retail Lighting
Using multiple lighting fixtures is a great way to add dimension to your retail displays. For example, track heads can be used to add light to displays throughout the center of the store while recessed downlights can be used to highlight products on a shelf.
When you install similar fixtures within a slat wood ceiling, it can create even more dimensional lighting effects.
In our office retail display store, we used our T65 track fixtures as our main source of light. We lined the walls with our RM35’s to create a unique wall washing effect that draws the eye to our product shelves and our quote wall. We also added in our TWW160 track wall washers to highlight some merchandise on a pegboard wall.
3. Slat Ceilings Look Great
Let’s be honest – the real reason we love a slat wood ceiling is because it looks awesome. We were able to create a minimal look without overwhelming our small store. Without our warm, wood slat ceiling, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve the same inviting look to our retail display.
There are many different types of wood ceilings you can buy, such as wood grille ceiling squares, wood slat wall panels and more. We chose to build our own since our space was small and we needed a custom fit.
How to Build a Slat Ceiling
@lumenture Thankfully our lighting engineers can also use power tools!! Stay tuned for progress of our office renovation 👏🏼😊 #HavaianasLivreDeCliches #fyp #renovation #diy #trending ♬ BORN FOR THIS - Foxxi
We built our slat ceiling using 1”x4” pieces of wood. We spaced them 4 inches apart and attached them to support beams.
We painted our support beams black to blend in with the black drop-ceiling installed. We needed to keep the drop ceiling tiles in place above our structure for insulation.
To hang our ceiling, we attached it to wiring on a pulley system and suspended it from the I-Beams in our ceiling (thank you, engineers!).
To be honest, installing the finished structure was a pretty big task. Good thing we have engineers to figure that out! You can watch the whole process of our engineering department installing our ceiling here.
