Laid out over more than 100-thousand hectares and offering around 1,000 residential sections, Ibex has delivered the complete urban lighting design and product supply for the multi-stage Northlake development.
Northlake developer Winton Group sought an urban lighting design that would make the suburb stand out from other local projects. Their General Manager in Wanaka, Marc Bretherton, says he liked the architectural look of the IBEX offering, ‘both in terms of the tall poles and the lower-level bollard lighting.’
Since the project started in 2016, we have provided lighting design services and supplied a full range of products for the development – intersection and street lighting, lighting for parks, reserves and walkways. Areas in private ownership – such as car parks – were also in the brief.
An essential requirement in the Southern Lakes area is minimising light pollution at night. We specified luminaries with a warm-coloured lamp and cowls that are Dark Sky Compliant.
A long-term partnership
The master planning, urban design and landscape architecture for Northlake are by Baxter Design. We collaborated with their team to achieve the desired style and placement of urban and street light fittings so they would work seamlessly with the roading, footpath and green space network.
From the suburb’s street lights to ground-level bollards, each fitting contributes to the project’s vision both in their aesthetics during the day and the lighting design for safety and ambience at night.
Regarding specification and product supply, we worked with the main contractor, Paterson Pitts, to deliver the lighting package for each development stage.
This consistency in partners between Winton, Baxter Design, Paterson Pitts and IBEX Lighting has made it easy to maintain the quality and style of the project throughout the last eight years of development and for the successive/final releases.
Product with longevity and good documentation
Our lighting design drawings and product specifications have moved smoothly through the Southern Lakes District Council consent process and external peer review. Through the design phase, all technical queries from the council were directed to us, which were addressed and closed out efficiently.
With the urban light installation becoming a public asset once the subdivision is built, it was critical to council that we could demonstrate the quality of Ibex products, including performance, durability, energy efficiency, ease of maintenance, and a solid warranty.
Delivering quality
Eight years into the development, we’ve ensured the lighting hardware has arrived on time for every stage of this complex development – even during the pandemic disruption in 2020 and 2021.
‘The team at Ibex are responsive and customer-centric,’ notes Winton Group’s Marc Bretherton. ‘It’s been a good, long-standing relationship. They check in with us and visit the site – their communications are good. It’s been really straightforward in that there’s not much required from me at all. Ibex work directly with our engineers and civil designers to prepare the plans.
‘Landscaping and lighting tend to be the things that people notice in any new subdivision, and we’ve received lots of positive feedback at Northlake on those important features.’
