Midcentury Texas
Vintage ceramic fixtures from San Antonio’s Beaumont Mood Lighting prove to be highly collectible
Back in the 1970s when he was a young architect, Rick Kendrick and his wife wanted some Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures for their San Antonio home.
Kendrick knew the fixtures were favorites of O’Neil Ford, often called the dean of Texas architects. Ford used the pierced ceramic or clay pendant lights and sconce shades in many of his works, including the Trinity University campus, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Dallas and residential homes.
So one day in 1978, the Kendricks visited Beaumont Mood in his ceramic studio on Broadway in San Antonio and ordered four fixtures: a large globe for the front foyer and three sconce shades for the backyard patio. Mood was such a stickler for details, he sent an employee to the Kendricks’ home to look at the interior colors — which is why part of the globe is the same green as the shag carpeting they had at the time.
It was a prescient purchase. Through the years, Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures have become favorites of passionate collectors who appreciate the lamps’ midcentury modern aesthetic.
While the Kendricks don’t remember how much they paid — “We were two working people with young children, so for sure it wasn’t too expensive,” Pat Kendrick said — pendant fixtures now are listed upward of $1,000 each. To this day, three of the four are still in use: the large globes in the entryway and two sconce covers on the back porch. The fourth is in storage.
While each lamp or set is unique, the basic design is consistent. The spheres are mostly round, oblong or cylindrical, while the sconce shades are semicircles or three-sided. The color palettes are wide, from bright primaries to muted pastels.
What makes them distinctive are the lines intricately carved into the ceramic and the dozens, even hundreds, of holes pierced through them. The pieces are attractive during the day, while at night, the holes send rays of softly diffused light throughout a room or across a patio.
The fixtures were designed and crafted beginning in the early ’60s by the then-husband-and-wife team of Beaumont and Martha Mood. Today, 60 years later, they’re so much a part of the environment, they often fade into the background, unnoticed.
“But once you start looking, you see them all around,” said Kathryn E. O’Rourke, associate professor of art history at Trinity University and editor of the book “O’Neil Ford on Architecture.” “They’re an important part of the historic character of San Antonio, especially of the midcentury era.”
Their popularity, however, is generally limited, at least geographically.
“They’re ubiquitous in San Antonio, in homes concentrated around Olmos Park and Terrell Hills, at Saint Mary’s Hall and even Bill Miller restaurants,” said Ted Allen, owner of Period Modern, a midcentury modern furniture store. “But it’s very much a regional thing. I sell at the Round Top Antiques Fair, and most people there have never heard of them.”
They’re also popular in certain pocket of Texas where Ford worked and used the lights in his projects.
Martha Mood began designing and crafting the decorative ceramic fixtures after meeting Ford in the late ’50s.
A 1962 article in Ceramics Monthly stated, “Ford was then at work on a number of architectural commissions for which he was unable to find suitable lighting fixtures and Mrs. Mood set out to create them for him.”
She developed the design, the article continues, with an eye to materials used in the architecture of the time, “particularly the soft pink Mexican brick used in many San Antonio buildings. … Her lamps soon became a ‘must’ in many new homes and buildings throughout the state.”
As their popularity and demand grew, her husband, known as “Bo,” took over manufacturing the lamps, according to a 1965 article in the Sunday Express and News.
“We used them on a lot of projects,” said Boone Powell, a former principal at architecture firm of Ford, Powell & Carson. “They’re simple, artistic and have that handmade look. With the punched holes and etched surfaces, they just seem appropriate for San Antonio.”
Creating the handmade lamps was a painstaking process, requiring molds made from either latheturned wood or plaster and careful timing to keep the ceramic moist enough to carve but not so moist it collapsed when removed from the cast. According to the Express and News article, Mood, apparently working alone at the time, was able to complete only four fixtures per day.
It’s difficult to determine the value of these vintage lamps.
“It’s an insane but shallow market,” said Rob Vogt, director of San Antonio’s Vogt Auctions, who gets lamps for auction only once every year or two.
“It’s like trying to value the work of a new artist who doesn’t have a track record.”
As a result, prices are all over the place. At Vogt, for example, a 28-inch-long pendant that was one of four that once hung in Stone Oak Presbyterian Church recently sold for $266. Another fixture from the same group is currently offered on Etsy for $1,550.
“My typical in-store price for smaller pendants is between $150 to $350; for larger ones, it’s $400 to $600,” Allen said.
It’s unknown when Beaumont Mood stopped making the lighting fixtures, but there is, to this day, a company in San Antonio called Beaumont Mood Lighting. A call to the number revealed little about the firm, however. A woman who identified herself as Jody McCall would say only the company is still in business, does not have a storefront and sells via “word of mouth and through past customers.”