Pearl Yard, Bermondsey

Introduction

Pearl Yard Bermondsey is one of London’s largest build-to-rent developments, rising on the former Peek Frean biscuit factory site in SE16.

Delivered by Greystar with Hawkins\Brown and HTA Design building on KPF’s masterplan, the scheme will provide over 1,600 rental homes alongside a school, office space, retail and community facilities across a 12-acre site. The first residents moved into Freans House in late 2025, with further phases continuing through 2026.

Detail Lighting supplied the lighting fittings for the communal and external areas of the scheme, working alongside Lighting Design Studio who led the lighting design. The brief covered corridors, lobbies, amenity spaces, entrances and external seating and orientation zones.

Detail Lighting’s role combined product supply with technical input through the design stage and ongoing support during delivery, providing fittings that met the visual ambition of the scheme while standing up to the commercial and long-term maintenance demands of build-to-rent at scale.

Project Brief

Pearl Yard is a new and exclusive mixed-use development, offering a place for occupants to live, work and play. The 12 acre site includes over 1,300 homes, 10,000 square metres of office space, 10,000 square metres of retail and leisure facilities, a secondary school, and improved streetscapes and playscapes, planted trees and new public yards and squares.

The project has revitalised the local neighbourhood, and has been converted from the former Peek Frean Biscuit Factory.Detail Lighting supplied fittings for the internal communal and external areas of the scheme, working alongside Lighting Design Studio who led the lighting design.

The brief focused on delivering high-quality, consistent lighting across corridors, amenity spaces, entrances and external seating and orientation zones, with the commercial discipline that a development of this scale demands.

Development

Detail Lighting’s involvement covered product supply, technical coordination with the lighting designer and ongoing support through to installation and delivery. Three products were specified across communal and external areas.

Teknic Fixed downlights for communal interiors

The Teknic Fixed downlight was specified in its 13W variant across corridors, lobbies and amenity spaces. It is a ceiling-recessed fixed downlight built around a die-cast aluminium body with a Ø70mm aperture, delivering up to 1,089 lumens at a 50-degree beam angle with a system efficacy of 107.5 lm/W.

The fitting runs at UGR ≤19 and achieves SDCM <3, which means colour consistency across hundreds of fittings stays tight enough that residents do not see the tonal shifts that often appear in low-cost downlighting when viewed along a long corridor.

The specification on this scheme was 3000K with a 20-degree beam, paired with DALI dimming for integration with the wider controls strategy. The Teknic Fixed meets Part L high-efficiency requirements, which matters for a scheme of this scale where cumulative wattage and compliance margins shape the whole electrical design.

The lens, chip and driver are replaceable, supporting Detail Lighting’s ‘Repair, why Replace’ ethos and giving the operator a route to long-term maintenance that avoids embodied carbon and waste further down the line.

The Fritz exterior spotlight was specified for external areas, complete with 2700K GU10 lamps to give a warm, residential tone across planting, facade features and approach routes.

Rated IP65 with a die-cast aluminium body, the Fritz is supplied as standard with an anti-glare cowl, honeycomb louvre and a 2m lead, which made installation on site straightforward for the electrical contractor and gave the lighting designer direct control over visual comfort without specifying accessories separately.

Beam angle options of 12, 24 and 36 degrees allowed the design team to mix narrow beams for feature lighting with wider beams for planting and general landscape wash. The fitting is supplied with a ground spike as standard and has a custom round fixing base available, so it can move between soft and hard landscaping without redesign. It is also Casambi compatible, meaning dimming control can be set at fixture level where the external lighting strategy calls for it.

For a residential scheme with active ground-floor uses, avoiding glare from exterior fittings is as important as the fitting itself. The anti-glare cowl and honeycomb do the heavy lifting here, reducing spill into resident windows and keeping the lit effect focused on the surfaces that matter.

Volans LEDline was used for outdoor seating and orientation lighting across external amenity spaces. It is a sealed 10x10mm flexible linear LED, rated IP68, UV and chemical resistant, and designed to run up to 12 metres in a single feed. At 10W per metre, delivering 800 lumens nominal in static white at CRI>93, it produces a clean line of low-level light that reads as architectural rather than decorative.

On this scheme it was specified at 2700K to tie into the warm tone used across the external palette. The product cuts at 41.6mm intervals in static white, allowing the linear runs to be sized precisely to seating edges and orientation details without awkward leftover sections. An outdoor walk-over profile is available where the linear line crosses a trafficked surface, which gave the design team the option to carry light across thresholds without changing product type.

Factory-sealed connections at front, side or bottom feed made installation predictable on site, and the IP68 rating means the product is specified for the long term rather than replaced on a short maintenance cycle.

Outcome

The delivered lighting scheme achieves a clean, consistent aesthetic across communal and external areas, with the technical performance to match.

The Teknic Fixed gives corridors and amenity spaces a clean ceiling plane with uniform colour and low glare. The Fritz delivers controlled accent lighting to the facade and landscape without light spill into apartments. Volans LEDline carries a warm linear thread through seating and orientation zones that reinforces the scheme’s identity at night.

For the specifiers, contractors and client-side teams involved, the value sat in three areas. First, the product performance met the visual ambition that the lighting designer had set out, with no dilution during value engineering. Second, the technical specifications, including high efficacy, tight SDCM (colour consistency between fittings), UGR control (glare performance) and long-life components with replaceable parts, gave the scheme a credible basis for Part L compliance and a realistic long-term maintenance position. And finally, Detail Lighting’s involvement was practical – product supply, technical input and site support rather than a simple handover of products.

The lead designer at Lighting Design Studio comments:

“Detail Lighting’s downlights offered a strong balance between performance and cost efficiency, making them an ideal choice for the project. Their high efficacy and competitive pricing ensured that client value was achieved without compromising on overall quality or visual outcome. Importantly, the fittings still delivered a clean, consistent aesthetic, meaning the scheme maintained a high-end look while remaining commercially sensible.”

Working with Detail Lighting
Detail Lighting brings together product supply, in-house lighting design, and technical coordination under one roof. That means specifiers get a single point of responsibility from early design input through to driver specification, profile detailing, DALI integration and on-site support.

Products are backed by a ‘Repair, why Replace?’ approach, with replaceable lenses, chips and drivers across the core range to extend operational life and reduce embodied carbon.

For architects, main contractors, M&E consultants and developers working on residential, commercial, hospitality or mixed-use schemes, the team is available to discuss specifications, review calculations or visit a project at the earliest stage. Contact Detail Lighting at sales@detaillighting.co.uk or 01908 613256 to talk through your next project.

Credits

We would like to credit lighting Lighting Design Studio, the lighting consultants for the project