Help with lighting design basics for new HC garage conversion

[nelliekins]

Hi everyone,

I've just kicked off my garage conversion project (click here if you want to find out more!), and it is all progressing nicely... The only problem is that I have the artistic flair of a brick If anyone can offer advice on the following, it would be greatly appreciated - I'm on a deadline because of an impending new arrival!

The room is approximately 5.1m x 2.47m. I think that I need either 3 or 4 zones - here's the breakdown:

Zone 1 - main seating area
I am intending to have two rows of 2 seats, and whilst the room is predominantly for movie watching (and hence either dimmed between 90% and off), I guess decent lighting is needed for this area...

Then we have the movie posters - I have an original quad cinema poster of SW films IV+V nicely framed - that'll need showing off! I've also acquired a set of the nice holographic film posters for SW IV,V,VI that HMV sold a few years back - would be good to get the dust off them, too... Then there's the signed photos of most of the Stargate cast (including Teryl Rothery cuddling in after a long night partying - although my missus is probably going to take it down if I put that one up!!!)

I was thinking nice simple downlighters - any opinions?


Zone 2 - office area
There is an office area at the back of the room (small desk with a 26" LCD TV as the monitor - also used for quick Xbox sessions when I don't want to fire up the PJ). I would expect this to have separate lighting, because I don't need to waste power and light up the whole room just to use the office.

I was thinking this should be halogen downlighters too... - thoughts?


Zone 3 - DVDs
I want some lighting for the DVD shelves that will essentially fill one wall (or rather, the alcoves along one wall) - I had been thinking about LED lighting attached to the underside of the shelves to illuminate the DVDs on the shelf below - but this gets expensive really quickly when you start talking about 12 shelves @ 1.5m each! As an example, Maplin sell LED lighting on a per 5cm basis - it would cost over £300 to just light up my DVDs at that rate!!!

I think that this could be just on/off control, but dimmable would be really nice - but would require some sort of PWM circuit I guess?

Questions here:
1. Can anyone recommend a more cost-effective solution?
2. Should this be a separate zone to Zone 1, or combined?


Zone 4 - Screen backlighting
I want some dimmable (LED?) lighting to provide a "glow" around my projector screen - I assume this would live on a separate circuit / control to the DVD lighting, since they'll be on different levels at different times...


General
Are there any tricks to laying out groups of lights within a zone? I've read about "golden section" in some of the threads here, but can't seem to get my head around why you wouldn't put lights on a square grid instead?!?!

HELP!!!