New ceiling fans sleeker, smarter
It doesn’t matter how design-minded you are — when the temperature approaches triple digits, you want to beat the heat.
But ceiling fans are a contentious topic. Blacklisted by designers for being noisy, tacky and outdated, they’re often the first thing to go in a home renovation and a cause for debate in divided households in which one party wants circulation and one wants style.
“It’s not the principle of fans that’s bothersome — it’s that they aren’t welldesigned,” said Amanda Carol, an interior designer in San Francisco. “Until recently, they’ve been these wimpy, wobbly eyesores.”
But ceiling fans are smarter, sleeker and quieter than ever.
Picking the right style of ceiling fan can be tough, but brands and retailers have made it easy to shop based on your taste and space. Hunter’s website (hunterfan.com) lets you shop by look (casual, traditional, global and so on) and then narrow down the options by noting your hardware and flooring.
There are rustic fans with shades that look like Mason jars (Hunter’s Crown Canyon fan, $179, homedepot.com), vintage-inspired fans with mid-century modern flair (Hunter’s Cranbrook fan, $229, hunterfan.com), industrial fans built for indoor/outdoor use (Home Decorators Collection’s Kensgrove fan, $299, homedepot.com) and even smart fans that connect to your WiFi (Hunter’s Symphony fan, $299, amazon. com).
Those who like extra oomph from their fans should consider Haiku Home (haikuhome.com), a brand that makes heavy-duty fans in high-end finishes. Working out of an $8.5 million air-movement research facility in Lexington, Kentucky — reportedly the only of its kind — the company re-creates environments such as coffee shops and gyms to test its products. It makes only one fan, sold at four price points (starting at $550), but it’s earned scores of awards for its design, stability, weight (13 pounds) and energy-saving technology. The star feature: its occupancy sensor that stops the fan from running when the room is empty.
“We’re design-first,” said chief operating officer Jon Bostock, who came to Haiku from General Electric, “but there’s payoff in your energy bill, too. We don’t ignore that.”
What about installation? Bostock said half of Haiku’s customers install their own fans, and Lisa Park, director of fan merchandising at Home Depot in Atlanta, estimated that the vast majority of Home Depot’s crafty customers do it themselves, too. But she acknowledged that it’s a “huge pain point. . . . The whole industry is looking at this.”
If you’d rather skip the mess of wires and ladders, hire an electrician or handyman. Most will do the job for $150 to $300.