Project brief. A 34-key boutique hotel in Salzburg’s Altstadt district asked us to rebuild the lobby reception feature wall into a signed, brand-visible neon backdrop before the winter Christkindlmarkt season. The interior designer wanted three things in one wall: a legible “GRUSS & WILLKOMMEN” script logo, a soft continuous halo behind the check-in desk, and a hidden linear wash above the concierge alcove. The room had no ceiling void to hide a driver and a strict noise limit — this is where hotel lobby neon feature lighting stops being decoration and becomes a small integration project.
1. Brief received from the design office
The Salzburg interior studio (working on behalf of the owner) delivered three deliverables in writing:
- Sign height: 380 mm cap-height Grotesque script, 4.2 m total length, single stroke width 10 mm.
- Halo behind reception: 2700K warm-white continuous line, no visible dots at 1.2 m viewing distance.
- Alcove wash: 3000K, dimmable 0–100% via existing DALI bus already in the lobby.
Because the wall is oak-veneer over MDF, all drivers had to sit in a services cupboard 6.4 m away — that immediately shaped our voltage and product choice.
2. Product choice and why
We built the wall with three neon flex profiles from the Senfey ES-NEON-SIGN-01 top-view neon flex family plus a 360° round profile for the round bowl of the “G”. Full BOM sits in the sidebar; the reasoning:
- Script logo: ES-NEON-SIGN-02 side-view flex — 8 mm bend radius gave a clean serif return on the R and W without kinking.
- Reception halo: ES-NEON-SIGN-01 top-view flex in 2700K — the silicone diffuser sits 12 mm inside the oak reveal so the source is invisible from the guest side.
- Alcove wash: 24 V dimmable driver bank tied to the hotel’s DALI-2 loop.
All three sit on a shared 24 V rail; a single driver failure never takes the sign dark, which the owner wrote into the maintenance spec.
3. Site constraints that changed the wiring plan
Two constraints from the walkthrough forced a redesign:
- 6.4 m driver run. At 24 V the calculated end-of-line drop on 2.5 mm² feed was 3.1%. Acceptable for the halo but not for the sign — colour shift would show on the R return. Solution: dual-end feed from a mid-way junction box concealed inside the concierge column.
- Silence rule. The lobby has a 30 dB(A) night limit. We swapped the studio’s default constant-voltage driver family for a Meanwell HLG-series with no audible fan — measured 18 dB(A) at 300 mm inside the cupboard door with the meter borrowed from the hotel BMS engineer.
4. Compliance and safety — what we actually referenced
Because the sign lives inside a public-access lobby, three standards drove the paperwork the hotel required for insurance:
- IP rating verified against IEC 60529 at IP65 — sufficient for interior humidity in a passive-humidified lobby.
- Photobiological group verified as RG0 (exempt) per IEC 62471 — required for signage <1 m from a person’s face at the check-in desk.
- Illuminance around the reception task plane held at 200 lx per EN 12464-1 reception zone recommendation — checked with the hotel’s on-site light meter before sign-off.
5. Result and handover
The wall was commissioned in a two-night blackout window. Measured on hand-over morning:
- Line load 4.2 m sign + 3.6 m halo + 1.8 m alcove = 9.6 m total, 82 W at 24 V.
- Dim-to-warm on the alcove tracks 3000K→2200K across 0–20% DALI level, matching the lobby fireplace.
- The GM signed off on the “no visible dots” test at 1.2 m — the reason we specified top-view neon flex and not a bare COB strip for that section.
Sign-off certificate references the three standards; the copy is stored in the hotel’s asset register alongside the driver serial numbers. Contractors looking at similar hotel lobby neon feature lighting jobs can request the full BOM and DALI address map by contacting our project team.
Where this case fits in our knowledge base
This project sits inside our Hotel LED Lighting application pillar and its Hotel Outdoor & Facade Lighting cluster — the same team writes both. For signage material choices we cross-reference our guide on LED neon signage, and for scene-based bar/lobby lighting logic see LED neon bar lights and signs.
