At twenty2, the staff uses a pair of specially designed wall viewing luminaires to deliver proper light intensity and uniformity over a large vertical viewing surface, helping them to consistently provide a high-quality product. 

A Connecticut-based design studio, twenty2 produces high-end, made-to-order wallcoverings – wallpapers, grasscloths, murals, and more – for the home decor market. They use the units to ensure a wallcovering’s colors visual match, roll after roll, year after year.

“If [a wallcovering] shows up and it’s not right, it can throw a whole room off,” said Robertson Hartnett, who started twenty2 with his wife, Kyra, in Brooklyn, New York, in 2001. “We literally couldn’t maintain consistency without the use of these fixtures.”

An Even, Uniform Light

Hartnett didn’t always use the light units, two GTI GLL-1032e/PH luminaires, to inspect their wallcoverings. Before the luminaires, twenty2 used high-quality LED flood lights. These lit the work in an uneven way and cast a shadow when someone stood too close to the work, making it tricky to do a close examination.

At an SGIA (Specialty Graphics Imaging Association) trade show, Hartnett visited GTI’s booth and tested a luminaire. GTI’s wall viewing luminaires use a hybrid parabolic lens, a unique geometry design, and GTI’s Graphiclite 100 lamps. These luminaires direct the light toward the vertical viewing surface and downward, this allowing a close inspection of artwork without creating shadow. Right away Rob knew they would improve twenty2’s workflow. 

Often, twenty2 works with clients to produce custom wallcoverings. Many of their clients are firms that sell coverings to interior designers. 

When a client comes to twenty2 with an image or design, their staff uses a camera to digitize it or they reproduce it by hand. With a computer, the image is made into a repeat, which are identical cells that can be placed on top of or side by side of one another. Finally, a customer-approved sample, called a standard, is printed on a wide-format printer, stored, and used to reproduce a covering. During this production process, a wallcovering’s colors are visually inspected under the GTI luminaires. They’re an integral part of the twenty2 studio and enable the design and production teams – who use them every day – to do visual color matching, which, Hartnett explains, is an essential step in their workflow. 

“[GTI’s lighting] gives us confidence that what we’re doing is right, so when a customer comes to us with an issue, we can speak with intelligence about our process,” he said.

Outfitted with GTI wall viewing luminaires, a high-end manufacturer such as twenty2 can do a close inspection of their work to ensure its quality and maintain its consistency.