Thursday, July 3, 2008
A crystal chandelier does not require over-the-top opulent surroundings. It can grace a normal room of understated elegance. This image of a dining room is my evidence.
There are no marble columns, no frescos, no elaborate swags billowing over the drapes. This room establishes its unique style by a happy mix of colors and patterns, fine moldings and charming details like the silver tea service. And of course the Schonbek crystal chandelier supports the traditional feeling of the room very nicely and ties everything together at a subliminal level, the crystal subtly reflecting all the colors in the room.
This chandelier is called Sterling, and it’s a Schonbek classic of long standing. The body of the chandelier is all crystal, with ornate cut crystal column parts, hand-formed crystal arms and beautifully faceted handcut crystal ornaments. Or you can choose Venetian crystal, for a quieter degree of sparkle. Sterling comes in a variety of sizes and configurations. I particularly like the Sterling mini crystal chandelier.
What’s interesting about this room is that’s not a Schonbek photo. It’s a stock photo. Someone else admired the beauty of this room and its chandelier – and took a picture. We use a lot of stock photos in our design work, and we came upon this room accidentally while browsing images on the Internet. And so the provenance of the photo is as unpretentious as the room itself.
We’ll be adding this image to Beautiful Rooms in the next week or so. I’m already thinking about the copy. Perhaps the headline will be something like “Everyday elegance.”
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The latest STRASS® Swarovski® crystal colors are a major piece of news in the lighting business, and they look especially gorgeous displayed on the new Schonbek cast chandeliers.
Go to our Sophia page and roll over the thumbnails to see what I mean.
Andrew Schonbek calls the new crystal colors “crystal effects.” The crystal is not actually colored. Rather there’s a metallic coating of top-secret composition applied to the surface of clear crystal in a unique process proprietary to Swarovski®. Crystal thus transformed has a sheen and reflectivity like nothing the world has ever seen.
Except, that is, in certain Swarovski® crystal jewels used in fashion jewelry. This new look in crystal is very much related to the extraordinary effects Swarovski® achieves in jewelry design. The crystal is alive and exhibits an astonishing tonal range.
I would describe these crystal effects as ineffable, mysterious, illusionary. With Silver Shade there’s the glint of silver combined with the cool glow of moonlight. With Golden Shadow there’s the sensation of shimmering waves of golden light. But you really have to see these crystal effects in person to appreciate their subtlety and evocative qualities.
With the new Schonbek cast chandeliers, you have incredibly rich and ornate castings bathed in a whole new kind of spectral light, if you choose the new crystal effects.
Silver Shade and Golden Shadow are crystal options with Sophia, Milano and several other traditional designs, as well as with Schonbek’s new contemporary designs, Quantum and Plaza.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Schonbek never does anything half-hearted. The new collections of cast crystal chandeliers are proof of this.
Fully cast chandeliers are an eighteenth-century phenomenon, and they're still a strong category (as we say in the trade) in the twenty-first century. But recently Schonbek decided that the category needed a shake-up.
Schonbek already has a wonderful example of a cast chandelier in its portfolio, namely La Scala. This chandelier is distinguished by cast arms and scrolls made from antique Schonbek family molds. Schonbek departed from conventional design by combining castings with substantial crystal column parts and very heavy hangings of crystal. La Scala very quickly became a new classic after its introduction.
But Andrew Schonbek is always thinking of the next thing. He wanted to experiment with fully cast chandeliers as a logical next step.
Nobody was making fully cast chandeliers from the ground up. They were picking up parts from this and that catalog and piecing their cast chandeliers together as best they could. So you might see a very distinctive curlicue in the arms, but no trace of that curlicue in the center column., which would be exhibiting yet another set of design motifs. Schonbek considers this kind of patchwork quilt design to be anathema.
So Schonbek got together with Italian artisans from what Andrew considers the world’s finest foundry. The result of this collaboration was the creation of dozens of molds for a completely new array of ornate cast components, all in perfect harmony with each other.
Andrew Schonbek in a newsletter to the trade described the ornamentation of the castings in this way: “Bell flowers, leaves (but not the overused acanthus variety) and various delicate fronds are woven together in a surpassing decorative tapestry.”
Schonbek even reinvented utilitarian parts of the chandeliers so that things like wiring bodies could become integral elements in the design aesthetic. No one had ever gone to this extreme before.
The new designs are called Milano and Sophia. See images and descriptions on this website, but better yet, see them in a showroom. The detail work in the castings deserves close-up observation.
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