Friday, March 28, 2008
A Da Vinci™ crystal chandelier is the perfect lighting for a beach house, I discovered the other day leafing through a decorating magazine.

A clever designer had put together a sophisticated but easy-maintenance living room for a seaside home.

The washable rug, rubberized armchair and dishwasher safe Da Vinci™ crystal chandelier were just a few of the charming features of this room.

I was impressed by the eclectic character of the setting. I’ve always maintained that you can successfully mix antique styling with contemporary if you have a good eye. But here was proof in a picture.

Da Vinci™ with its pure, perfectly round shape does seem to work in a surprising range of environments. It can offer an interesting contrast to an old fashioned mirror, gauzy drapes and fancy throw pillows.

Da Vinci™ seems to be appearing spontaneously these days in a variety of home décor magazines. In some cases it gets credited erroneously with being dishwasher safe in very large sizes, however, so I’d like to correct that impression. If your Da Vinci™ crystal chandelier has a diameter of 24 inches or less, you will be able to take it apart and put it in your dishwasher. But if it’s three or five feet in diameter, no dishwasher will be big enough to receive it. A carwash maybe. (Just kidding.) It’s still washable, but you’ll need to follow a different method. Ask a Geometrix® dealer for guidance!

Getting back to the idea of eclecticism, it really is a wonderful new era of interior design. Eclecticism, after all, is very natural. Over the course of a lifetime you buy different pieces yourself, inherit others and pick up things in your travels too. By force of your personality, if you have an artistic bent, these things can go rather nicely together. If you bring a crystal chandelier into the mix, it can further harmonize the room, because it picks up and refracts all the colors in the space.

So contemporary designers have been brave enough to imitate this natural process of accumulation, making it happen not over time but all at once. And by force of their talent, they make it work beautifully.

Art imitating nature.

Thursday, March 27, 2008
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” wrote Michelangelo.

By extension I would say, every chunk of crystal has the energy of light inside it, and it’s the task of the artist to set it free.

In the case of a crystal chandelier there’s more than one artist – the designer of the crystal jewels, and the chandelier designer.

Sculpting a crystal jewel to catch the light is a skill that goes back many centuries. We have classic shapes of crystal today that are the same cuts you might see on a seventeenth-century crystal chandelier. The original designers of cut crystal ornaments were totally focused on refracting and magnifying the weak pinpoints of light produced by the candles on the chandelier.

Since those early days, the greatest leap forward in crystal design came from Swarovski. The Swarovski family made it their mission to intensify the brilliance of decorative crystal by means of scientific design and precision cutting.

Historically, the Venetians were interested in colored crystal – color interacting with light in the medium of crystal. Swarovski in the twenty-first century has done amazing things with colored crystal. See Strass® Golden Teak crystal. And the wild Strass® colors in Elements.

But the crystal chandelier designer has the fun of optimizing the interaction of crystal jewels within a carefully orchestrated composition. The Schonbeks have been engaged in this delightful pursuit since 1870.

Sometimes Schonbek’s object is a magnificent display of prismatic brilliance. Olde World is a dazzling example. Whereas, with a rock crystal chandelier like La Scala, the crystal is subtly luminous, light conveyed to us from prehistoric times.

Monday, March 24, 2008

A crystal chandelier is not just one experience. It changes with the seasons. It’s nocturnal as well as full of life all through the day.

With the coming of spring the days are getting longer and hopefully sunnier, and a crystal chandelier can play with the sunlight even into evening.

While you’re at work during the day, your home is not just waiting around doing nothing, not if you have a crystal chandelier. Light is streaming through the windows, and the crystal suspended from your chandelier is catching, refracting and shattering the rays, casting rainbows and bursts of prismatic light on the walls and ceiling. The first time you see this phenomenon, it’s utterly surprising and delightful.

Staring at the walls on weekends can be a pleasurable activity when you have a crystal chandelier. During the week, you can enjoy the thought of your home shimmering with energy, the energy you’ve given it by introducing a crystal chandelier into the mix.

A crystal chandelier spends more time unlit than lit as a rule because most people work. But it’s never really dark or static. The tiniest ray of light slipping through drapery or under a door will incite a crystal chandelier to glint and gleam.

A crystal chandelier is so incredibly responsive to every type of light that it absolutely needs a dimmer switch to restrain it. Rarely if ever will you want your crystal chandelier at full strength. For one thing, low wattage produces an almost liquid quality of light that’s highly romantic. No other light source offers anything like this extraordinary ambience.