The Emotional Power of Light
Light shapes how a room feels, how colours read, how textures come alive, how we feel in a space. Ketra is built around that idea. It doesn't just light a room. It follows the character of natural daylight from morning to night.
Ketra is now available in the UK, and our East Horsley showroom, an easy trip from London, was one of the first places in the country to show it working. It is at its best in basements, lower ground floors and any room short of daylight.
One light engine, one system
LED light is efficient, powerful and long-lasting, but hard to control well. Mix fittings from several makers, set them to the same colour temperature, and one looks slightly pink and another slightly green. Dim them and they part company again.
Lutron builds the light engine and the control into the same fitting, so every fitting in a room behaves identically at every level, from downlights to linear accents to lamps. Dimming is smooth and flicker-free down to 0.1%.
It's the difference between a ceiling full of lights and a lighting scheme.
Light that follows the day
Set up once, Natural Show runs a room's lighting automatically from dawn to night, following the colour and brightness of daylight outside and matched to your location. Nobody has to press a button. Blinds and lighting work together, so as daylight comes and goes the system balances the two, and rooms feel naturally lit rather than switched on.
Scenes for the moments in between
For when you want something different, there are scenes. Relax is a warm, low light for reading or dinner, and Energise is a cooler, brighter light for cooking or working late. One touch changes the whole feel of the room.
The quality you notice
Ketra's full, balanced spectrum makes skin tones, timber, fabrics and artwork look as they should, and every fitting matches. Most people can't say exactly why, but they tell us it simply feels better.
Basement and Lower Ground Floor Lighting
Natural Show comes into its own in rooms with little or no daylight. Many London houses have a lower ground floor kitchen and living space with a skylight or window at one end and a dim back half. Basement conversions, cinema rooms, gyms, pools, wine rooms, dressing rooms and inner halls have the same problem. However many downlights go in, a room with no daylight can still feel flat and closed in.
Ketra gives those rooms the rhythm of a day outside. Cool and bright at midday, warm and low in the evening. We've been building false windows and skylights for years, and with Ketra behind them they now change through the day like the real thing.
The result is a basement or lower ground floor that feels part of the house, not a room underneath it. If you are planning a basement or lower ground floor, talk to us early, while the ceilings are still open.
There's a Ketra skylight working in our showroom. Stand under it and watch a full day's light play out.
Ketra beyond the home
Most of our work is in private houses, from family homes where the owners want to invest in better light to prime and super-prime properties. Ketra works just as well in restaurants and hotels: a dining room that moves from lunch to dinner without anyone touching a switch, or rooms and corridors deep inside a building that would otherwise never see daylight.
Planning a restaurant, hotel or other commercial project? Come and see Ketra working first.
Full spectrum
Most tuneable fittings blend a warm LED with a cool one. Ketra mixes colour across four channels to create white light from 1,400K deep amber to 10,000K cool daylight, with 16.7 million colours available when you want them. More than 70 patents sit behind it.
That range gives true candlelight warmth at the bottom end, true daylight at the top, and every step in between on the natural light curve. The light also warms as it dims, as daylight and firelight do.
Light that never drifts
Every LED shifts with heat and age, and across a ceiling of downlights you eventually see it: one fitting slightly pinker, another slightly greener.
Ketra fixes this at the source. Each fitting checks its own light output 360 times a second and corrects itself, holding its colour within a single step for the life of the system. Lutron calls it Color Lock. The light you sign off on day one is the light you still have in year ten.
Vibrancy
It's Ketra's third dial. Brightness changes how much light you have, colour temperature changes how warm it feels, and Vibrancy changes how the light renders colour, without changing the colour of the light itself.
In the showroom we show it on a painting. Turn Vibrancy up and the reds deepen and the brushwork stands out, while the white light around it stays the same. For interiors built around art, colour and texture, it's the difference between lighting a room and finishing it.
TruBeam optics
Colour mixing is only half the job; the light still has to land well. Ketra clusters its LEDs tightly so the fitting behaves as a single point of light, already mixed to one colour, then shapes it with a reflector and a smoothing lens. The beam is even in colour and brightness from centre to edge, with no hot spots, scalloping or coloured fringe.
The Ketra range in the UK
D2 Remodeler Downlight (D2R)
Designed to install in a finished ceiling, available in fixed, adjustable and wall wash configurations.
LS0 Lightbar Slim Linear
Ketra accent luminaire for low-profile applications such as under-cabinet.
A20 Lamp
Ketra's natural white light in a versatile A-series lamp for existing decorative fittings.
All three are individually controlled and wireless, and run on Lutron HomeWorks QSX and RA3 alongside the keypads and blinds. Because the zones live in software rather than wiring, a scheme can be changed later without an electrician.
Full-spectrum light, into a finished ceiling
Most premium lighting assumes a building site. The D2R doesn't. It's designed to go into a ceiling that's already finished.
Many of the houses we work in are period properties, with floors that can't come up, ceilings that can't come down and owners who aren't moving out for six months. The D2R puts full-spectrum, self-correcting, individually controlled light into those rooms without chasing, rewiring or redecorating.
Ketra questions
Can Ketra go into an existing house?
Yes. The D2R downlight installs through a finished, decorated ceiling, and the A20 lamps fit existing decorative fittings. Most of our Ketra work is in houses people already live in.
Does Ketra need a Lutron system?
Yes. Ketra runs on Lutron HomeWorks QSX and RA3, alongside the keypads, blinds and the rest of the lighting. We design, install and program the whole system.
Is Ketra good for basement lighting?
Yes, it is one of the best uses for it. In a basement or lower ground floor, Ketra can follow the colour and brightness of daylight outside, so the room feels brighter in the day and calmer in the evening. It works especially well behind a false skylight or window.
What is Natural Show?
A Ketra setting that runs a room's lighting automatically from dawn to night, following the colour and brightness of daylight outside.
Where can I see Ketra in the UK?
In our Ketra experience showroom in East Horsley, Surrey. Visits are by appointment. Call us on 020 8543 4451.
Ketra with Future Light Design
We handle the whole package: lighting design, fittings, installation, programming, scene setting and aftercare once you've lived with it. We don't just show Ketra working. We show what it can do in a real room, including the low-light spaces where it makes the biggest difference.
See also: Orluna CCXWatch the light change in front of you
See Ketra for yourself in our Ketra experience showroom in East Horsley, Surrey. From there, we work across Surrey, London and the South of England, and internationally.
020 8543 4451 | info@futurelightdesign.co.uk