Hi there Jack, thank you very much for your words.
Both for the daytime and nightime shots I used hdris to light the interior. I've been using corona for quite a while now but I am still amazed by how easy it is to light scenes using hdris, there's basically no difference time wise from corona sky. I'm talking about time difference because I come from a vray background (like most guys here I guess) and we all know how much longer proper hdri lighting workflows took.
I usually left each render either overnight or from morning untill 6pm when I got home from work so on average it would be about 7/8 hours, but that was just for my satisfaction because I wanted crisp renders although they were looking very good after 3/4 hours.
My configuration is 2x Xeon 5650 processor and 24 GB Ram.
I did encounter some slight issues with the strong DOF on the close-up images with the lamps in the foreground. The highlights and the glass material didn't help too much. After a thorough research on the forum I saw that it is a flaw that corona has, even though I'm sure there will be an improvement in the future in this regard. I did a lot of tests with the render settings to get rid of the noise but in the end I ended up using pretty much default settings. What I ended up doing was fixing those renders with the zdepth pass, I just gave the DOF a further slight blur in After Effects using frischluft (ps. the photoshop frischluft plugin doesn't work as well as the AE one)
One other issue that I encountered is in the night shots. In one render (4th one from bottom to top) I used IES files with a medium intensity for directionality. Unfortunately, at the moment, directionality is known to cause serious noise (stronger noise as you raise the intensity from 0 to 1) but Keymaster is aware of this and I read in a post that he will fix that in the future.
These 2 issues are very very important for the type of visuals that I am (and I think all of us) are doing so I hope Keymaster will give the proper priority to these (I will still use corona even if he doesn't xD )
Cheers !
