As the Practice nears its fiftieth year anniversary and having produced lighting design solutions across six different decades, the discipline of lighting design is now widely recognised as a professional service in its own right now. This is in no small measure due to the work of dpa lighting consultants and its founder Derek Phillips who established the practice in 1958. Early commissions included The Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong, Westminster Abbey and the original P&O Cruise Liner, the Oriana. The practice, incorporating Campbell Design, has now completed around 4,800 projects in 50 different countries across the world’s continents. With offices in Dubai, Japan, London and Oxfordshire and a team of 50 people we have an unrivalled human resource.

Maintaining a personal service remains of prime importance to us. Our Practice is divided into six design teams, each with a partner overseeing the work and contributing creatively and technical to the design solutions. A highly experienced Associate leads each group in the day to day activities of the design work.

In 2007 dpa lighting consultants amalgamated with Campbell Design to further strengthen our already substantial team. Campbell Design, led by Gary Campbell, had rapidly gained numerous commissions, awards and recognition as an organisation producing lighting design excellence. This was culminated in 2006 with Gary Campbell being awarded the inaugural “lighting designer of the year” crown. Collectively we are even stronger than we were individually, with dpa’s excellent administrative structure providing the design professionals with greater time to concentrate on providing a highly creative and practical design service.

The Practice’s work does not just include designing artificial lighting solutions for interior and exterior spaces and structures, but encompasses lighting masterplanning, environmental impact reports, light art, daylight and sun penetration studies and work as expert witnesses in the field of light. We believe this breadth of skills and understanding of both natural and artificial light sets our Practice apart from others.

At the same time as striving for innovation our solutions are always balanced with practical thinking about maintenance, durability and investment to ensure an appropriate response for each and every client is achieved.

The practice’s independence, which was established by architect Derek Phillips is fiercely guarded and our method of operation and ethics resonate from Derek’s architectural grounding. This is in fact even more important today than ever before as it provides our clients with the security that the advice we provide is in no way influenced by any other commercial gain. We work entirely for the benefit of our clients and are remunerated on a fee basis only.

As with any consultancy our team is our strength, many of our designers have practiced lighting design for many years covering an enormous range of building types from the lighting of a single picture in someone’s home to the masterplanning of a city and just about everything in between. Our designers emanate from a wide variety of backgrounds including architecture, theatrical lighting, product design, electrical engineering, urban design, interior design, mirco-electronic engineering, physics, astronomy, television lighting and English. This breadth of knowledge provides us with an immense skill base allowing us to resource each and every project with the very best team.

Derek established our practice motto, a quote from John Christie, founder of Glyndebourne Opera 'not the best we can do, but the best that can be done anywhere', and this remains at the heart of the practice philosophy.