Illuminating the Tallest Hotel in the World | Ciel Dubai Marina
INTRODUCTION
In November 2025, Ciel Dubai Marina opened as the world’s tallest hotel. At 377 m / 1,237 ft, the NORR-designed tower secured Guinness World Records certification in December 2025 and earned the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) 2025 Award of Excellence in both the Best Tall Buildings 300m+ and Best Tall Buildings (Middle East & Africa) categories.Operated by Vignette Collection (IHG) for developer The First Group, Ciel houses 1,004 guestrooms with floor-to-ceiling panoramic glass above eight dining destinations and one of the world’s highest infinity pools.
NORR’s design intent is a quest for clarity and elegance: a sculptural elliptical form that tapers in both the upper and lower sections, a silver façade that reflects the surrounding sea and sky, and graceful recesses at the apex. NORR served as both architect and lighting designer of record, and GVA Lighting was selected to bring the night-time vision to life across two distinct zones, the North-West façade and the apex crown.
GVA’s technology and products, especially INFINITY® and the HIGHLIGHTER® Series, are highly unique in the market. Extremely long lighting circuits of up to 600+ m / 2,000+ ft, combined with exceptional compactness and material savings, made the aesthetic and engineering achievements of this project possible.
NORTH-WEST FAÇADE
The North-West façade is Ciel’s public face to the Marina, and the side that carries the project’s signature lighting gesture. Two slim ribbons of light climb the full height of the tower from the podium to Level 80, follow the tapered silhouette at a gentle outward angle, and converge at the top into a single closed loop. The composition compresses 377 metres of architecture into a clean graphic outline, readable from across Palm Jumeirah and Bluewaters Island.
The NW façade ribbons are lit by GVA’s HIGHLIGHTER® GEN4 Color-Changing, a modular lighting system with both direct-view or cove / accent capabilities. Ultra compact, and able to be configured into DL, DL-NICHE, COVE OUTDOOR or COVE INDOOR configurations, it is one of the most innovative and adaptable products in the market.
On the Ciel Tower, each ribbon is a layered composition of two HIGHLIGHTER® GEN4 Color-Changing configurations working together.
A direct-view line in DL-ROUND configuration delivers the bright saturated line the eye locks onto from a distance, and a soft cove light in COVE-OUTDOOR configuration accent the adjacent façade panel, knitting the line into the architecture and giving the composition depth. In total, more than 4,300 HIGHLIGHTER® modules form a total of roughly 1.3km / 4,265ft of Color-Changing linear lighting.
The NW façade’s lighting system is powered by INFINITY®, GVA’s proprietary power distribution technology that delivers power at 380V DC. As a result of the high voltage, it draws roughly 1.6 times less current than a 240 V AC system and eight times less than a 48V DC system.
This low current unlocks INFINITY®’s defining capability: a single continuous lighting circuit running up to 600+m / 2,000+ft. Working alongside COLOR-STREAM®, GVA’s ultra-fast proprietary communication protocol, both power and data are carried on the same cable across that full length, offering unmatched flexibility to system design. The same low current also allows smaller cables and connectors with minimal voltage loss over distance, and by keeping bulky components out of the luminaire, INFINITY® enables small, sleek products like HIGHLIGHTER®.
In the case of Ciel, this allowed designers to execute the NW façade lighting design in just 8 separate runs from 8 centralized power supplies, with the longest run at ~202m / 665ft. Only 160m / 525ft of leader cable is used, simplifying overall system complexity and installation cost.
INFINITY® minimizes the carbon footprint of the system by significantly reducing the materials that need to be produced. A conventional 48V DC (ELV) approach, for example, caps run lengths severely and calls for more façade penetrations, more ELV power supplies, and up to 170 times more leader cable over a 600m / 2,000ft length. All of that adds to material production, system complexity, installation and transportation cost, and weight strain on the structure. An AC system needs fewer penetrations and leader cables than ELV, though still more than INFINITY®, and it carries its own material burden: at 600m / 2,000ft it would take around 402 luminaires, each with an AC power supply inside, meaning 402 additional power supplies to manufacture and ship.
By centralizing power delivery, INFINITY® also raises overall reliability. It removes every power supply from inside the luminaires, the number one cause of luminaire failure. Those failures are typically driven by electrolytic capacitors wearing out inside the supplies, so removing the power supply removes the root of the problem. On that same 600m / 2,000ft façade, those 402 in-luminaire power supplies represent 402 built-in points of failure. INFINITY® eliminates them entirely.
Taken together, these qualities translate into significant cost savings across the life of the project. There is less material to produce and transport, lower installation and labour cost from the simplified system, reduced maintenance thanks to the removal of the primary failure point, and improved energy efficiency from the low-current, low-loss power delivery.
COLOR-STREAM®, GVA’s ultra-fast proprietary communication protocol, handles the dynamic effects and controls across the NW façade. At 6.25 Mbps, roughly 16 times faster than standard DMX512, it carries data the full length of the ribbons with liquid-smooth dimming and effects. Its 60Hz refresh rate keeps the façade free of stroboscopic effects, so Ciel reads cleanly on camera, an important quality for a landmark filmed and photographed continuously across Dubai Marina.
Driving the color is COLOR-AMP®, GVA’s smart algorithm, which allocates available power across color channels in real time, delivering up to 3x higher lumen output per color channel at the same power rating while keeping the system within safe operating conditions. This is what gives the façade the punch to register from miles away, while lowering power consumption.
Every luminaire and power component was engineered and built in-house at GVA’s vertically integrated Oakville, Ontario facility, under ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 management systems.
THE CROWN
Above the 76th floor, the tower resolves into its signature gesture, a sculpted apex aperture flanked by angled column legs that converge at the top. GVA lights the crown across layered truss and soffit positions.
Two runs of STR10® MONO, 38.4m / 126ft in total, graze the soffit and inner wall in static 3000K white to anchor the base of the aperture, while 34 FL™200-GEN2 and 8 FL™100-GEN2 Color-Changing-OM luminaires define the truss lines that frame the aperture, its column legs and crown in saturated dynamic color.
STR10® MONO is the most compact high-power design in the STR series. Built on the award-winning COLOR-STREAM®platform, it delivers exceptional performance and flexibility for wall washing and grazing, with the visual impact and durability that demanding environments require.
The FL-GEN2 family, here the FL™200-GEN2-OM and FL™100-GEN2-OM both in Color-Changing form, is built on the same COLOR-STREAM® platform, while also equipped with COLOR-AMP®, giving the range outstanding flexibility to realize creative vision with architectural flood and spot lighting. In Outer Mixing (OM) configuration, they offer higher output, more LED choices, and with narrow beam angle available.
All crown luminaires operate on COLOR-STREAM® while FL™ GEN2 Color-Changing are with COLOR-AMP® built in.
CONCLUSION
For The First Group and IHG’s Vignette Collection, the new lighting system gives the world’s tallest hotel a night-time identity that reads clearly across Dubai Marina, Palm Jumeirah and Bluewaters, turning the tower into a fixed point on the skyline after dark.
For the wider district, Ciel adds a calm, precise line of light to one of the most photographed waterfronts in the world. Because the whole scheme runs on a single consolidated INFINITY® platform, that presence is delivered with less equipment, lower running cost, and a system built to hold its performance that the building deserves.
PRODUCTS SPECIFIED
NW Facade
- 1.3 linear km /4,265 linear ft of HIGHLIGHTER® GEN4 Color Changing in DL-ROUND and COVE-OUTDOOR configurations
- 8 INFINITY® Power Supplies
Crown
- 38.4m / 126ft of STR10® MONO
- 34 FL200™ GEN2 COLOR CHANGING – OM
- 8 FL100™ GEN2 COLOR CHANGING – OM
Client: The First Group
Operator: Vignette Collection (IHG)
Architect: NORR
Contractor: China Railway 18th Bureau Group
GVA Partner / Photos: Huda Lighting
The “world’s tallest hotel” designation, Guinness World Records certification and CTBUH 2025 Award of Excellence are as recognized by the respective organizations at the time of the building’s opening.
INFINITY®, COLOR-STREAM®, COLOR-AMP®, HIGHLIGHTER®, STR10® and FL™ are trademarks of GVA Lighting, Inc. Ciel Dubai Marina, NORR, The First Group, Vignette Collection, IHG, Huda Lighting, Guinness World Records and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) are the property of their respective owners and are referenced for identification only.
Luminaire counts, module counts, lengths and cable quantities reflect design and bill-of-materials information at the time of writing, are approximate, and may include spares or be subject to as-built variation.
Actual current depends on system design and site conditions.
Maximum continuous circuit length under specific design conditions. Achievable length varies by load, configuration and project requirements.
