Forest and Nature School

Forest and Nature School is a childcare centre for Andrew Fleck Children Services at 411 Corkstown Road, designed with CSV Architects for the youngest users a building can have — infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Flux specified the lighting inside and out and tuned it to a room full of small children: warm, low-glare, and legible to someone two feet tall.

Each age group gets its own colour. The rooms are lit by round pendants painted to match — red in the toddler room, blue in preschool, yellow for the infants — hung low so the colour reads at a child’s eye level rather than lost in the ceiling. The light and the paint arrive together; the fixture is part of the room’s identity, not an afterthought over it.

Because small children are loud, the feature fixtures also listen. The gathering spaces hang with acoustic luminaires that light and absorb sound at once — the drum-formed Edison Sonic Drum, the felt-bodied Luceplan Silenzio, and the Aaline Acoustic Light — so a room of thirty toddlers stays a place adults can still think in. A-N-D Orbit pendants mark the entry and the quiet corners.

The working light is calm and even. Liteline Sigma2 downlights carry the general illumination across classrooms and corridors, kept soft for nap rooms and low sightlines. Dedicated emergency and exit lighting covers life safety to code, held up by an LVS emergency power control if the power drops.

Outside, the light follows the children into the yard. Cree Edge area luminaires on Aluminous steel poles cover parking and drop-off, and Visual Comfort Modern Collection wall-and-step lights with wall-washers pick out the entries and the infant play area after dark.

All of it runs on a Lutron control system — daylight and occupancy sensors with tuned levels — so the light steps down for nap time and back up for pick-up without anyone touching a switch.

Related: Daycare Centre

Design by CSV Architects. Photography by Kevin Belanger.