Friday, July 27, 2007
Choosing a crystal color for a Bolero crystal chandelier could be a highpoint in your decorating life.

We just posted a new page on Bolero, showing your many crystal color choices. Of course color reproduction on the web is never true. You’re better off going to a big lighting showroom that carries Schonbek and seeing Bolero in person. Even if they don’t have all the colors, you can ask to see the new Schonbek catalog, which reproduces the colors as well as a printed page can. Andrew Schonbek himself critiqued the proofs over and over, and we didn’t rest until we got the color values just about perfect.

Getting back to the fun you’re going to have with Bolero, you can pick up colors in your décor, or contrast with them, as you wish. Bolero is also the kind of chandelier that could inspire a room. Decide on the color and style you like, and then design a room specifically to showcase this crystal chandelier. This will be a wonderful exercise of creativity.

Bolero colors are fashion colors – some bold and daring, some soft and nostalgic, a few so subtle as to be almost indefinable. My favorites are Antique Green, Cranberry and Olivine. It would be immensely interesting to design a room around an Antique Green crystal chandelier.

The thing I should emphasize about Bolero is that it’s an all-crystal chandelier. This is a trade term for a chandelier with crystal arms and crystal column parts – no visible metal framework. Most chandeliers have a metal frame or frame elements. This type of chandelier was invented in the eighteenth century. As I learned at the Chandelirious lecture at the Shelburne Museum the other night, there are not many antique survivors of this style, because glass-arm chandeliers were fragile. It took Schonbek’s state-of-the-art engineering to put new strength into all-crystal chandeliers. You don’t see the strength, but it’s there.

With Bolero, you can indulge your passion for color, as well as your attraction to antique styles of chandeliers. And it’s designed to delight future generations.

Thursday, July 26, 2007
A mini chandelier with Strass® Golden Teak crystal ornaments has a lot going for it.

I just noticed an image in the new Schonbek catalog of a tiny New Orleans in Golden Teak. Schonbek glazes the crystal bobeches and centerpiece teak to complement the Golden Teak crystal pendants. This uniformity of tone works especially well in a mini chandelier.

Golden Teak crystal is a deep dark gold. It’s not exactly glitzy, but rather very rich. Myriad shades of gold manifest as the prismatic crystal does its dance of light. The show of shimmering light this new crystal produces is something quite remarkable.

Besides the mini chandelier, there’s another image of New Orleans that doesn’t appear on this website. The chandelier is 24 inches in diameter and really lovely. This is a good size for a modest dining room.  The finish shown in this image is Heirloom Bronze, my new favorite. Although this is quite a dark finish, it’s subtly mottled and faintly gleaming all at once. Lots of complexity. Even the candleslips are Heirloom Bronze, which deepens the dark gold tonality of the whole design.

Don’t overlook the finishes page of this website, if you’re in the process of selecting a Schonbek crystal chandelier. The interaction between finish, crystal type and your décor is important.

Of course, if the dimensions of your dining room or great room are palatial, you can order a custom New Orleans in Golden Teak with a 60-inch diameter. I only have an image of the custom New Orleans in clear crystal, however, so you have to picture it in a glittering golden mode. But here’s an image of New Orleans in Golden Teak with a 32-inch diameter, also quite spectacular.

Now that that word has fallen from my fingers onto the keyboard, I do think  it’s le mot juste. Spectacular is the word for a chandelier in Golden Teak crystal, whether a mini chandelier or a maxi chandelier or something in-between.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007
I spent Friday evening and Saturday afternoon with a photographer and his crew shooting Geometrix® chandeliers and pendants in an eccentric  contemporary home made from recycled containership materials.

Someone else from our office covered most of the shoot, but I had the fun of participating in the design of three settings: a sitting area, a transitional space and a bathroom.

I must say, a ll the things I’ve been writing about Geometrix® are true! It’s tremendously interesting, playing with these crystal chandeliers and pendants shaped like boxes, cylinders and parallelograms. And they combine dramatically with contemporary furnishings. It’s amazing, too, how good Geometrix® looks in an environment full of rusty industrial metals and concrete.

The Refrax® crystal chandelier that Andrew Schonbek calls the “room divider” begs to be used to control and energize space. But figuring out how to do this in practice is challenging. We managed to do it, and low and behold, a large and somewhat cold space acquired an enticing personality. You really wanted to enter that playfully invented space and live a new and exciting life. Unfortunately the photo won’t be ready until next week, so I can’t show you what I mean. But you can look at this previous room set to see the room divider.

No matter how carefully you plan a shoot and gather the props, there are always some unwelcome surprises. You realize you need two chairs, not one. Or someone on the set takes a dislike to the metal sculpture you thought was so wonderful. Or you wish the rug was bigger (this can be fixed, of course, in Photoshop).

The one thing that doesn’t disappoint is the Geometrix® lighting design by Schonbek. Once you find the right position for it, the rest of the furnishings gain importance by association.

When you have your setting composed, if you put up your hands and try blanking out the Geometrix® chandelier, everything goes flat. This is true of  a traditional Schonbek crystal chandelier as well. A room is transformed by its presence, diminished by its absence.