By Douglas Weinstein
All photography courtesy of Lutron Ketra
IN PART ONE OF OUR PROFILE ON LUTRON ELECTRONICS, we covered the origins of the company and Founder Joel Spira’s invention of the light dimmer. Over many years Lutron pioneered lighting control, creating a thriving industry that has added to the ambiance of countless homes and commercial properties. They entered the motorized window covering market in 2001 and have become a dominant force in automated shading solutions. With the acquisition of Ketra in 2018, Lutron developed a complete solution for harvesting natural light and then seamlessly transitioning into nighttime hours when electric light repaints the canvas of our living and working spaces.
In my research for this article, I noted a quote from Ketra’s website that I think speaks volumes to the vision that inspires the company, “Light, it shapes the world around us. It energizes and soothes, invigorates and inspires. Dynamic and always evolving, it’s as alive as the very life it illuminates.”
In Part Two I sit down with David Weinstein, Vice President – Residential Sales for Lutron. He is responsible for developing specification and sales growth across residential market segments for all of Lutron’s professionally designed and installed products and solutions. David has nearly 50 years of experience in the lighting industry, having spent many years at manufacturers’ representative Yusen Associates in the role of President before joining Lutron in 1999.
David is also the newly appointed Chairperson of The CEDIA Foundation and serves on the board of both Integration Systems Europe and The Home Technology Association. He is the Immediate Past Chairperson of the CEDIA Board.
It is very important to embrace innovation from the perspective of how it will differentiate the value we can all deliver to the clients we are working to serve. Lutron is deeply committed to the CEDIA dealer community with an increasing focus on expanding the market for our Intelligent Lighting Solutions. I also believe it is very important for residential architects, designers, and developers to work cooperatively together with CEDIA dealers and with companies like Lutron to curate impactful collaboration-oriented relationships.
DOUG: David, we go back many years, and you’re somewhat of a fixture in the CEDIA and design-build communities. Thank you for talking with us. Speak about Ketra and Lutron’s interest in acquiring them years ago.
DAVID: It’s great to sit down with you and talk about Ketra. It’s an exciting time to be involved in growing the luxury lighting industry. So, we acquired the company for a lot of reasons, but number one, they were innovative-based and had created an amazing dynamic and natural lighting system designed around a breakthrough emitter and optical package. Their engineering and design roots did not come from the lighting industry, so our breakthrough technology that could be applied to lighting systems was just as amazing. Ketra learned how to create the world’s best light through understanding how they could take red, green, blue and white LEDs, create an emitter and then create an optical package that would deliver great light and precision beam control. Ketra’s lighting innovations could bring the sun’s dynamic and natural light quality into interior spaces.
Let’s talk about the light we have known since the dawn of civilization. Light by its very nature is sunlight, light from fire, and light that we always understood came from incandescent light bulbs, coming from heat and fire. Natural light is pure white light. However, throughout the course of the day, the light changes and shifts from the warmth of an oceanside sunrise, to the blue nature of the midday sun, to the golden hour tones that we see when we begin to approach the warmth and beauty of a magical sunset. What we witness is the change in color temperature. So, what Ketra does is create light from 1400K (Kelvin) color temperature, which is warmer than a candle, to 10000K color temperature, which is cooler than moonscape. In addition, Ketra’s Natural Show feature automatically manages the color temperature of the lighting system to match the color temperature of the outdoor environment based on the latitude and longitude of the home. The comfort and pleasance of extending outdoor light into interior spaces has to be experienced to be fully understood.
In addition to our best-in-class white light capabilities, Ketra can also produce saturated colors with over 16.7 million color variations. Because we mix red, green, blue and white to create the best white light, we also have a feature called vibrancy that accentuates color to make artwork, floral arrangements, surfaces and textures come alive and dramatically enhance the visual experience.
With over 70 patents, the basics involve the components of the emitter. Our Ketra emitter consists of 16 LEDs (four each for red, green, blue and white). Our emitter also receives visual feedback to properly manage light output and color consistency over the life of the system, ensuring the same optical quality as day one. We call this feature Color Lock. Finally, we have designed our own optical package to mix the light and precisely manage the beam control. In fact, we manufacture and test our emitters, finished lamps, downlights and linear products at our Austin, Texas facility to ensure consistent quality and reliability.
Our system is designed to perform reliably and with simplicity and flexibility in mind. Because of our ability to control our Intelligent Lighting System wirelessly, Ketra eliminates the need for dimming panels and local dimmers. In fact, the wiring infrastructure is incredibly efficient. Lutron invented the first two-way RF lighting control system back in 1997 when we introduced RadioRA. Since that time, there are now literally millions of Lutron lighting controls and shading systems being reliably controlled by our wireless control technology.
With our reliability in mind, you simply power your lighting system by running as little as one 15A circuit for up to 80 lamps, linear or downlights. So, in addition to offering truly dynamic and natural light that can be controlled from 100 percent to .1 percent without flicker or striation, it is also important to understand that the installed cost of a Ketra lighting system is comparable to many traditionally wired and controlled architectural lighting fixtures.
DOUG: Ketra offers a complete array of lighting solutions, right?
DAVID: Yes. We started out with screw-in lamps that can be retrofitted into table lamps, decorative lighting, etc. We also make linear, so things like under/over cabinet, toe kick, anywhere where there’s a linear light, we have a form factor for that. In fact, Lutron offers a growing portfolio of solutions to match any need or budget. Our Lightbar Slim linear system is a Ketra product. It has all the merits of Ketra, 1400K to 10000K, vibrancy and saturated color. We also offer the Lumaris tape light system which is a white light product and provides a color temperature range of 1800K to 4000K. Last year, we introduced Lumaris RGB+TW which offers dynamic tunable white light as well as saturated color across the same color temperature range. It is important to understand that our Intelligent Lighting Solutions deliver both tunable white and warm-dim across a wide range of color temperatures. I don’t believe that today, any single manufacturer can offer this kind of illumination performance.
The Ketra D2 downlight system is the evolution and innovation of the original D3 product. The D3 is an amazing downlight, but there were things we wanted to evolve. The first was to reduce the aperture from 3-inch to 2-inch, because that’s what the market was asking for. We also wanted to enhance the aesthetic element and can now offer more beautiful finishes and trim design options. The Ketra D2 is a great step forward in terms of offering high performance, leading aesthetics and the best illumination system performance.
Doug, what I like to tell people, we’re not a lighting fixture company. We are a lighting system company because the system starts with our Homeworks QSX processor and includes our wireless interface, and our luxury-centric offering of keypads including our Palladiom, Alisse and our newest Aviena keypad. With a focus on beautiful finishes, intuitive control and clean lines, homeowners can easily select their desired lighting and shading scenes and access them with a touch of a button. Our simple and flexible system approach creates a new level of sophistication for any living space.
Of course, and for the design community, our beautiful, elegant, intuitive keypads and beautiful finishes and color options along with the simplicity of the system lets them focus on the ability to design very functional, intuitive and beautiful interior spaces that will delight their clients and enhance their reputation.
DOUG: Talk to us about the new Rania product.
DAVID: Our new Rania downlight product offers the exact same housing and trim options as our flagship Ketra product. Rania is designed to deliver the best white light. It does not produce saturated colors or offer vibrancy because our white light is made by mixing white light. Most importantly, Rania gives specifiers and dealers more options to design amazing spaces.
Rania delivers natural white light with a range of 1800K color temperature to 5500K color temperature. The Rania D2 is physically identical to Ketra, so you can blend them into a project to address a design criteria, a budget, or a specific illumination need. As an example, you can design Ketra into primary living areas where you have artwork or may want to utilize Vibrancy or the saturated color feature and then design the Rania D2 into rooms where you want the best white light, like task areas, laundry rooms, or secondary bedrooms. Rania also features Natural Show, so like Ketra, it can correlate with the natural outdoor lighting dynamic from sunrise to sunset.
Rania is system synergistic with Ketra and offers a better installed cost value than many comparable traditionally wired and controlled white light LED fixtures. Most recently, we introduced our Rania linear product offering which, like our Rania downlight, offers identical system matched white light color range and dimming performance for linear lighting applications.
DOUG: The lighting design industry has really embraced Ketra, hasn’t it?
DAVID: A growing number of interior designers, architects and lighting designers love Ketra because they can create successful design outcomes using our flexible, dynamic and natural solutions. They can properly illuminate surfaces and by playing with color, they can further enhance or accentuate objects, whether it’s artwork, whether it’s floral arrangements, or whether it’s furniture, countertops and floors. They and their clients now have infinite possibilities.
We are working hard to build trusting relationships at the principal level with architects, designers, lighting consultants, builders and developers. Much of that is through their trade associations, but also through local relationship building. We also spend a lot of time working with our CEDIA dealer community to curate a collaboration group and invite them to visit Ketra’s collaboration studio in Austin, one of our experience showrooms, or to spend time at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West site in Scottsdale, Arizona to see and experience how Ketra has greatly enhanced the visual environment in a way that Frank Lloyd Wright had imagined, but was unable to achieve due to the technology limitations when he first designed and built that space. Through these kinds of collaboration building activities, our guests leave with a better understanding of the value and benefits of our solutions and feel confident in designing their next project with Lutron’s Ketra and broader Intelligent Lighting Solutions
DOUG: Final Thoughts?
DAVID: It is very important to embrace innovation from the perspective of how it will differentiate the value we can all deliver to the clients we are working to serve. Lutron is deeply committed to the CEDIA dealer community with an increasing focus on expanding the market for our Intelligent Lighting Solutions. I also believe it is very important for residential architects, designers, and developers to work cooperatively together with CEDIA dealers and with companies like Lutron to curate impactful collaboration-oriented relationships. Together, we will educate and inspire the industry through communicating the importance of today’s newest residential lighting innovations. I believe that by working creatively together, we can deliver the very best in lighting system performance for our luxury residential clients.
Douglas Weinstein is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Technology Designer Magazine and the Technology Insider Group, as well as a Partner at TIG Global PR. A thirty-year veteran of the consumer technology industry, he is the Co-Founder and past Executive Director of the Elf Foundation, a non-profit organization creating Room of Magic entertainment theaters in children’s hospitals across North America.
