Lighting the San Francisco Flower Market

Jackson Liles Architecture transformed the market’s diverse structures into a cohesive, modern facility with high ceilings, efficient drainage, and precise lighting to preserve flower quality and support vendor needs.
Oct. 17, 2026
5 min read
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Key Highlights

  • The project unified five different buildings into a single, high-performance market space with 40-foot ceiling heights and a polished concrete floor with over 100 drains for water management.
  • Advanced lighting systems, including Kenall EnviroPro luminaires, ensure accurate color rendering, making flowers look consistent inside and outside the market.
  • Lighting controls with multiple zones and dimming capabilities provide vendors with customizable lighting, improving flexibility and operational efficiency.
Sovann Muni Visual Lay and Angela Lai
Beautiful flower-filled interior of San Francisco Flower Market.

The San Francisco Flower Market is Northern California's largest wholesale floral marketplace. A few years ago, the Flower Market moved to a new home that required a lot of renovation. Jackson Liles Architecture was tapped to transform five older buildings,all built with different methods at different times, into one unified building. 

They stripped the building exterior, except for the wood roof deck, and created a high-performance building envelope with ceiling heights that are 40 ft. from the floor to the bottom of the roof in some places.

The interior is a stunning market space where floral professionals have access to bike lockers, shower facilities, and, for those who need them, utility sinks, water, and state-of-the-art, high-bay refrigeration storage. The polished concrete main floor is punctuated by drains.

"A flower market can be a messy business with lots of water, buckets, and flowers, so ample drainage is necessary. We have at least a hundred floor drains," said Julie Jackson, Principal, AIA LEED AP, Jackson Liles Architecture. Those drains include commercial-grade and heavy-duty area drains from MIFAB.

Jackson Liles Architecture/Kenall
Interior of San Francisco Flower Market with brilliant yellow flowers.

One of the most appreciated upgrades in the new market is the lighting. Accurate color rendering is critical for floral design and the San Francisco Flower Market was designed so that the flowers you purchase inside the market will have the same appearance when you step outside. “The [Kenall] EnviroPro luminaires were able to get us a TM-30 color fidelity of ninety-two percent. The other metric, gamut, defines how many of the colors are saturated. And the gamut for that product is 102. It pushed the color just beyond normal daylight, which was great for the flowers,” explains Craig Oty, CLD, IALD, Senior Lighting Designer, The Engineering Enterprise (TEE), Alameda, CA.  

Another chief consideration for the market lighting included appearance. “The industrial form factor of the EnviroPro luminaire is well suited to the Flower Market’s large warehouse environment, while their high-performance optics provide excellent illumination of the space,” says Tim Haley, Specification Sales, Associated Lighting Representatives, Inc., Oakland, CA.

“There were many other choices, but we thought it would be best to provide more of a historical look to match with the age of the buildings,” says Oty.

Additionally, there was the inevitability that birds would find their way inside the market. “The EnviroPro luminaire has a domed top so the birds can’t land on them,” adds Britney Caldwell, Electrical Designer, TEE. 

New lighting controls are a boon for vendors too. “We have a lot of control zones for a space that we’d normally have maybe one or two,” notes Caldwell. Although the added complexity made the controls system more challenging to design, it gave each vendor the flexibility to adjust the lighting above their stall. As Oty notes, “It’s not just switching, it’s dimmable.” The team relied on Wattstopper’s DLM. “[It] delivered a cost-effective, code-compliant lighting control solution, with a facility-friendly interface that simplifies operation and supports easy long-term maintenance,” says Haley.  

 

About the Author

Jana Madsen

Jana Madsen is an experienced communications and marketing professional with more than 20 years of expertise in writing, editing, and content strategy developed through reporting on and working within the AEC industry. Through her work with D. C. Taylor Co., freelance clients such as Architectural Products magazine, and previous editorial leadership with BUILDINGS magazine, she's developed a strong ability to collaborate with subject-matter experts, manage creative projects, and translate complex ideas into clear, engaging, and accessible content.

Her work is grounded in a clearly defined editorial process that includes research collection, source interviews, transcript review, organization of supporting materials, and careful content development. She is committed to communicating clearly, accurately, and with integrity, always striving to present the full story in a way that resonates with both technical experts and laypersons. Known for meeting word counts and deadlines while maintaining exceptionally high standards, she relentlessly pursues details that elevate the quality, clarity, and credibility of the final piece.

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