Lisa Warnock
Director of housing interiors, LRS Architects (Portland, Ore.)
Early into her now 20-year career as an interior designer, Lisa Warnock found her passion for the importance of lighting in the built environment and its role in affecting the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of inhabitants.
Recognizing that residents in memory care and assisted living communities are most restricted in accessing natural daylight, she set out to improve the daily life of residents by incorporating lighting strategies that automatically distribute the proper color and output of light to improve comfort and safety.
Most recently, she’s focused her advocacy on tunable lighting to support circadian rhythms and well-being. For a project at Capital Manor in Salem, Ore., Warnock and the design team utilized large windows and skylights to fill the memory care community with daylighting, with tunable lighting in the common areas.
Not overlooking the importance of caregivers’ well-being, she also applies these concepts to staff spaces to ensure lighting supports staff, including those working nightshifts. In addition to her design work, Warnock is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America and served on the Lighting for the Aged and Partially Sighted Committee, where she provided feedback on lighting code requirements for licensed care to make sure that recommendations support residents as intended and make sense for the design community to implement correctly.
Last December, she was promoted to director of housing interiors, leading LRS Architects’ multifamily and senior living interiors teams.
Environments for Aging: What sparked your passion for lighting design?
Lisa Warnock: While earning my interior design degree, I took a great lighting design class. I really enjoyed learning about the physical response we have to light, and it resonated and stayed with me.
I’ve always been sensitive to lighting, and it was interesting to learn about the science of lighting and its physical effects on people. I received an internship with my adjunct professor in the lighting firm where he worked and seriously considered becoming a lighting designer. Ultimately, I decided to stay on the interior designer track with a special emphasis on lighting to have more diverse work.
Why is lighting such an important element in the design of senior living environments, in particular?
Lighting is critically important for many reasons. The most important one, in my opinion, is improved health and well-being for the people living and working inside a space. It’s been proven that blue light exposure during sleep hours disrupts critical hormone production and that this disruption can lead to a whole host of negative health outcomes, such as increased risk of cancer, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease.
It’s also been proven that exposure to higher levels of light at certain intervals in the early morning improves health and well-being, especially in seniors. Researchers and lighting professionals are still trying to find the exact recipe for success for the commissioning of tunable lighting systems, but it’s still going to take some trial and error.
How did circadian lighting become a part of your work?
I was introduced to the concept in 2011 during the programming phase of a remodel for The Springs Living in Lake Oswego, Ore. The client was converting a two-story assisted living building into a ground-floor memory care and remodeled assisted living community. In Oregon, memory care is restricted to the first floor, so to achieve the desired design for that first floor, we needed to excavate to create more square footage. The owner challenged us to exceed the code-required amount of windows and natural light.
We developed some creative solutions and got a lot of daylight into the space, but the community wanted to do more to improve the light quality. At the time, Chuck Archer, director of development for The Springs Living, brought forth this cool new idea he had heard about called “tunable lighting,” aka circadian lighting. He introduced us to Eunice Noell-Waggoner and Robert Dupuy, experts in the subject matter, and brought them into the project to share their knowledge.
I was so enthusiastic about tunable lighting that they took me under their wing and have since become both friends and mentors. We meet up for wine and chat when we can to conspire on ways to keep spreading the word and finding partners willing to perform case studies.
Your passion extends outside your firm as you also share your knowledge as a member of IES. Why is it important to you to contribute to that lighting association?
I’ve stayed involved in IES for years for a variety of reasons. I love the educational resources and the design guidelines available for every application that spell out best practices for all project types. Also, I like to bridge the gap to the architectural community to bring awareness of the IES resources to the people doing a lot of the design work out there in the senior living space. Many projects don’t have the benefit of having a dedicated lighting designer.
It’s up to the architect or interior designer to design the lighting and the engineer to execute what is shown in our plans. For that reason, we must understand how to thoughtfully design the lighting. It’s also really important to contribute feedback to this great organization. Oregon is one of the many states that we work in that has adopted RP-28 guidelines into the state licensing requirements for the light levels required by area and by task.
Sometimes these guidelines are misinterpreted by the licensing authorities having jurisdiction, and sometimes the guidelines need to be revised to provide more clarity to prevent an eleventh-hour construction correction due to an unexpected interpretation. Fortunately, I was able to contribute to a committee in the most recent editing of RP-28 and share my experiences in some recent inspections.
What’s the key to ensuring lighting guidelines/recommendations support the needs of residents while also making sense for the architectural community?
The key is being engaged and staying vocal. For example, I’m still pushing back on the new recommendation by the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) to provide 100 foot-candles in the lobby of a building because I don’t think it makes sense. IES has recommended it because they want to make sure that someone coming into an interior space from a super-bright summer’s day doesn’t get disorientated suddenly by a dark space.
Older eyes have a harder time accommodating back and forth between dark and light spaces and it can take a minute to adjust, so brighter interior lighting can help ease that transition. But 100 foot-candles are quite high, really costly, and difficult to provide while still creating a comfortable sense of arrival.
It’s a careful balancing act to create the right amount of light to keep people safe and supported but also feel that they are in a warm and inviting space.
What are some outcomes you’ve seen at the communities where you’ve implemented your lighting design strategies?
All of my projects have been new construction or new program renovations, so I haven’t had the opportunity for a true case study or a “before and after” comparison on a project yet. But I will tell you that the staff and development teams provide a lot of positive post-occupancy feedback. One of the most appreciated features that I hear about is that the evening lighting has a natural calming quality. The residents can naturally become sleepy, which, in turn, helps with less medication usage and reduces the amount of staff and time it takes to meet all the resident’s needs.
Since the The Springs Living project, I’ve been involved in four additional ground-up communities for that client, where they continue to invest in making tunable lighting as a part of the program, which says a lot. Also, I’ve recently completed a new memory care project using tunable lighting for another Oregon operator, Capital Manor, and have several additional projects on the boards or in construction that are either considering or have decided to use a tunable system, so the momentum is growing.
What’s your vision for what senior living should look like in the future?
I hope our industry embraces the WELL Building Standard. It makes sense to design and develop buildings that make our residents and staff healthier while spending so much of their time indoors. The fact that WELL has embraced tunable lighting as part of the requirements is a bonus for me.
This standard addresses all of the elements that make up wellness holistically, focusing on design not only to improve air, water, and thermal comfort but also to support movement, mental health, and healthy nourishment to name a few. I see our industry responding to this in a big way once more is known about the pilot program that’s in development for WELL in Senior Living.
