Stand a car under a showroom's warm spotlights and it will look finished. Move it into flat daylight and the truth appears: fine swirls, holograms from a hurried polish, a wing that no longer quite matches the door. Light does not create these flaws. It simply decides whether you are allowed to see them.
So when we planned the Nice atelier, the lighting was drawn before almost everything else. Continuous ceiling lines, colour-accurate output, no glare and no shadowed corners. The room was built around the light, not the other way round — because the light is the instrument we work by.
“If a defect can hide in our bay, it will find you on the road. So we built a room where nothing hides.”
Colour-accurate, or not at all
Ordinary workshop tubes render colour poorly: plenty of output, little fidelity. Under them, a deep blue reads as black and a hologram simply disappears. Our lighting is specified for colour accuracy at a daylight temperature, so metallic flake, pearl and tinted lacquer behave exactly as they will outside. What we correct under these lights stays corrected in the sun.
Glare is the other thief. A harsh point source throws a bright star onto the panel and blinds you to everything around it. We use broad, even, diffused lines of light instead — moving reflections that travel across the paint and let the eye follow a scratch from one end of the panel to the other.
A sealed room, a steady eye
Controlled light only works in a controlled room. Our single bay is sealed against dust and daylight both, so conditions at nine in the evening are identical to nine in the morning. Judgement, unlike enthusiasm, needs consistency: the same panel, the same light, the same standard, every hour we work.
The result is quiet confidence rather than theatre. When a car leaves the atelier, it has already survived the harshest viewing it will ever receive. Sunlight over the Promenade des Anglais is generous by comparison — and that is precisely how we want it.