Friday, August 17, 2007

What if you want an exotic chandelier? A crystal chandelier suggestive of faraway places and extraordinary adventures?

You are fortunate, because exotic crystal chandeliers do exist, and they can be found in the Schonbek portfolio.

Tango is the most obvious example, especially if you specify the shades with the leopard fabric and gold trim. But even the crystal ornamentation is exotic. Instead of traditional faceted crystal pendants you have solid crystal spheres, each with an orbiting strand of crystal beads. And the crystal spear at the finial point looks deliciously dangerous.

Flamenco is a working out of a similar design theme with rock crystal ornaments. Rock crystal is inherently exotic, dating back as it does to the early times of our planet. Cataclysmic events and tremendous temperatures and pressures caused the formation of rock crystal quartz. In some ancient civilizations rock crystal was valued more highly than diamonds. So you can feel like an adventurer of sorts by living with a rock crystal chandelier.

Lovers of rain forests and tropical islands should check out Tahitian.  This crystal chandelier looks rather like a burst of exotic vegetation in a remote jungle, except that its exuberant fronds are a dazzling gold color. The crystal pendants are an unusually pale shade of amethyst. There are surprising little crystal spheres integrated into the design. And each bobeche is a stylized composition: a faceted disk of Light Amethyst crystal sitting on a Black Diamond crystal.

Exoticism also invades some traditional Schonbek designs. Romanoff, for instance. This crystal chandelier has a flavor of intrigue because of design influences from sources like czarist Russia, Byzantium and ancient Rome.

I would consider Vendome rather exotic too, partly because it doesn’t look like any other crystal chandelier I’ve ever seen. The lead crystal urn that’s so prominent in this design has a mysterious luminosity. And the massive crystal sphere at the heart of the chandelier is a natural wonder. Because of the spiky looking chains, I can picture this crystal chandelier hanging in a medieval castle. Although in fact, people in the Middle Ages were born too soon to have crystal chandeliers. Dark times indeed.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Play the Decorating Game is a fun section of this website. This is where you get to pop different crystal chandeliers into the same interior.

To build these games, sometimes we take a photo that already has a Schonbek chandelier in it, and we remove the chandelier to create a space for other Schonbek designs. Or we find a stock photo of a room and just add chandeliers.

I shouldn’t say “just.” There’s endless Photoshop work involved. But the interesting thing about this exercise is how very dull these rooms look without any chandeliers in them, once you’ve been playing with the idea of hanging a chandelier.

A crystal chandelier adds so much character to a room. Just try leafing through a decorating magazine sometime and seeking out the rooms with chandeliers. (You may find a surprising number of them, because crystal chandeliers are hot.) Then cover up the chandelier with your fingers and see how much excitement is lost.

A crystal chandelier can be quite modest in scale and still add depth and personality to a room. My favorite example of this is an image we call Exotic Little Foyer in the Beautiful Rooms section of this website. My friend Kilah let us photograph her foyer, and we installed a mini chandelier called Scheherazade for the shot. The Artist’s Living Room was shot in Kilah’s house too, with an Artifact.

After seeing chandeliers in rooms that were once chandelier-less, Kilah couldn’t go back to her former way of living. She bought several Schonbeks of her own for keeps. This is an example in real life of the transformative effect of a crystal chandelier. 

Monday, August 13, 2007

Originality is a rare and precious gift. The Schonbeks have it to an extraordinary degree. Recognizing originality is another gift that not everyone has, which is why knock-offs can succeed.

I believe that creativity is a habit of mind. It’s quite likely that everyone would be creative and original, if they cultivated these qualities from childhood.

The Schonbeks grew up watching their father Arnold Schonbek at his drawing board sketching chandeliers. They also learned from him how to judge the quality, cut and beauty of crystal. The love of beauty and beautiful things was something the Schonbeks absorbed at a very early age.

The ability to play, and play hard, is a big part of creativity. It’s been said that many inventions have arisen from children playing.

I always sense this playfulness when I look at the Schonbek portfolio of crystal chandeliers. The colored crystal chandelier collection is an obvious example of the joy of playing with color. As is often the case, however, the Schonbeks had to instigate the production of many new crystal colors and shapes in order to give play to their ideas. When they decided to design a new collection of colored crystal chandeliers, the materials on the market were very limited.

The black crystal chandelier was another astonishingly original idea. Schonbek seemed to be throwing out what we most valued about a traditional chandelier – the fire of prismatic crystal. But in fact, the glossy black crystal of a Schonbek black chandelier has its own unique appeal. And nothing is more fashionable than black. Schonbek has also achieved a high level of chic by combining black crystal with clear.

Talk about originality, how about the amazing introduction by Schonbek of a dishwasher-safe crystal chandelier? This invention arose from compassion for the end user, actually. Andrew Schonbek was determined to create a perfectly round crystal chandelier. But when he succeeded, he wondered how anyone would ever clean the crystal. And so the idea was born of having the chandelier come apart in sections. And since the frame was stainless steel, and the crystal gems attached rigidly to the frame, it seemed quite possible to wash these sections of the chandelier in a dishwasher. Schonbek’s engineers worked at that idea until it was a reality.

Most manufacturers wouldn’t worry about you and me, and our need to clean our crystal occasionally. But the Schonbek are not only imaginative about product design, they also envision the afterlives of their chandeliers in our homes.