The hose on the floor
Here's the thing nobody tells you about curved counters. You draw them, and they look generous and easy. Then you stand in the actual room, and the curve you drew wanders off somewhere it has no business going. The hose fixed that for me. I uncoiled it, laid it on the floor along the footprint of the counter, and pushed it around until the bend felt right under my feet. Chalk marks followed it, then didn't, then followed it again about a hand's width over. Twelve metres of hose teaches you humility. A curve on paper is an opinion. A curve on the floor is an argument you can actually have.
The curve has to earn its place
A bend in the ceiling, like a bend in a counter, has to do something. I've walked into rooms where the track swooped and swirled over nothing in particular, and your eye follows it and arrives nowhere, and the whole ceiling feels restless for no reason. So the first rule I made for myself was blunt: the track follows the counter, not the other way round. The counter curve guides people from the door to the till and past the pastry case. The light should do the same job. It traces the circulation. It marks where people stand. It gives the room one long soft gesture instead of a lot of little decorative ones. When the track's bend sits directly above the counter's bend, the whole cafe calms down. Nothing in the ceiling is performing. It's just agreeing with the floor. The system I ended up working with is the one laid out in Colorful 48V Flexible Track System, and its plan only makes sense once the floor has had its say.
Three hundred millimetres, and the steel has a memory
The flexible track I ended up using is from the Colorful series — a DC 48V flexible track, co-extruded TPE body, copper conductors inside, and a steel strip in the back that holds the shape once you bend it. Cross-section is 18 by 5mm, which is slim enough to look like a drawn line rather than a duct. It comes in rolls of 5, 10 and 20 metres, and in five colours: black, grey, green, khaki, orange. I used black. The minimum bending radius is 300mm, and that number is not a suggestion. I found out why on a scrap piece. Bend it tighter than that and you can feel the assembly resist — the TPE wants to keep its extrusion, the conductors don't enjoy being crowded. There's a moment when a bend wants to spring back at you, and if you're working close to the radius limit it springs back harder. That's the steel strip's memory doing its job. It remembers the shape you gave it, so give it a shape it can actually keep. Give yourself margin. My tightest bend on site was a good deal gentler than 300mm, and I never once regretted the extra room.
One more scrap-piece lesson, free of charge: bend the offcut, not the run. I cut a short length and took it through the full shape on the floor — in, out, back again — before the real roll came off the van. The offcut told me how the strip takes a set, how much it relaxes in the first hour, and whether my chalk arc was even physically available. It relaxed more than I expected. Not much. Enough that the supports had to be planned for the relaxed shape, not the shape it holds while your hands are on it.
Chalk the tangents first
The trick that saved me, and I'm not clever for knowing it, is to mark where the curve begins and ends before you touch the track. Tangents. The point where the arc peels away from the straight run, and the point where it comes back. I chalked those spots on the floor, then carried them up to the ceiling with a plumb line and a pencil on a long stick. Everything got marked twice — once below, once above — and then I checked the two agreed. They rarely did on the first go. Where the curve meets a wall, I did the same thing, because a track that dies into plaster at an angle looks like a mistake, while a track that meets the wall square, or ends in a clean fitting, looks decided. A curve that has to meet a membrane ceiling is a different ceiling entirely — that coordination job belongs to Stretch-Ceiling Track: Coordination Before Installation — but the tangent habit is the same: mark where things change state, in both planes, before anything is cut. The chalk marks also gave me my measurement points. I wanted the arc checked against something physical, so I drove a screw into the floor at the centre of the bend, tied a string to it, and swung the string along the chalk. Same string, same radius, checked in four places. The hose gives you the feeling. The string gives you the fact.
A bend needs holding, not hoping
A springy track will not hold itself in the air out of optimism. On straight runs the fixings do the work and you stop thinking about them. On a bend, every support is fighting the steel's wish to straighten, so the supports need to be closer together and they need to be real. I spaced mine tighter through the arc than on the straights, and I checked the line with a long straightedge laid against the outside of the curve before tightening anything down. There's a sequence to it: fix the two ends of the arc first, then work towards the middle, because the ends anchor the shape and the middle is where it drifts. I also stopped handling the track with my hands once it was up. Warm hands soften TPE, and a warm bend sags a little before it sets. Small thing. Cost me a re-check anyway. If the run is suspended on rods, as one of the arrangements in the brochure shows, the rods want to land on the same side of the curve's centre, not scattered around it, or the whole thing twists. And if you're planning the circular aluminium track ring on suspension wires for a feature over a table, treat the ring as its own geometry with its own supports, not as something hanging off the flexible run. The fittings and power units behind all of this are the set gathered in Colorful Track Accessories and Power — worth pricing as one package, because a bend eats more small parts than a straight run ever does.
Lamps by target, not by spacing
I nearly ruined the ceiling with a pencil and a divider. Equal spacing along an arc is so tempting — tick, tick, tick, done — but it lights the arc, not the room. The lamps need to land where the work happens. One over the till, aimed down at the drawer. One washing the pastry case glass from a shallow angle so the reflections don't fight the croissants. Two along the seating edge, angled back towards the wall so people's faces aren't lit from directly above like an interview. Where the corridor narrows, the lamps get closer together because the targets do. Where the counter widens into the communal table, they spread out and aim wider. I marked each lamp position on the chalk by standing where a customer would stand and looking up, rather than measuring from the last lamp. Lamps in this series mount on the track in their own way — spotlights, grille, flood, decorative shapes — so each position got thought through against what that fitting needs; the grille-versus-flood part of that choice is argued properly in Grille vs Flood Magnetic Lights: Choosing the Mix, and it applies on a curve exactly as it does on a straight. The series carries CRI 90 and above, which mattered to me more than I expected, because pastry under bad light looks grey and nobody buys grey pastry. Power comes from 100W and 200W units, IP20, which is fine for a dry interior ceiling and told me to keep the drivers out of the wash-up zone entirely.
Stand back, crouch, look along it
You cannot judge a track from underneath it with your neck craned. So I kept leaving the room and coming back in. Stand at the door with your back to the street: does the bend read as one gesture? Crouch by the low table and look up the length of the run: do the supports line up, or do they stagger like bad teeth? Then the one that catches everything — stand at the far end and sight along the track like a rifle. A curve sighted along its length should sweep. If it kinks, if it flattens in the middle, if a fixing pulls it sideways, you'll see it from there and nowhere else. I found two flat spots that way. Both were places where I'd been shy with the supports. I also checked the two-layer suspended arrangement from the side, because the drop between layers reads very differently from a crouch than it does on a plan. A bend looks fine from one angle and embarrassed from every other. Walk the angles.
The drawing that survives the site
None of this holds together without a drawing, and the drawing has to be dimensioned, not a mood. Mine ended up with the tangent points located from fixed walls, the radius noted, the centre of the arc pinned to a screw hole in the floor plan, support positions marked with their spacings written in, lamp targets labelled with what each one is for, and the roll lengths broken down so the installers knew where the joints were meant to fall. Joints inside a bend are misery; I moved mine onto the straights. The drawing got dirty, got folded, got a coffee ring on the corner, and it still went up on the wall on installation morning and settled every argument before it started. The hose went home in the boot of the car, still coiled. The chalk came off with a mop. And the bend is still up there, doing its one job above the counter, holding the line the floor asked for.