Putting things in a new light
Industry improvements let innovation burn bright in chandeliers and more
‘‘Clean lines” might be the two most commonly used words when homeowners try to describe what they want in their house, whether it’s a new kitchen or a new sofa — and they can be applied to every design style, from traditional to modern. That minimalist aesthetic sweeping interior design applies to lighting, too, and design-forward chandeliers, pendants, sconces and table lamps are benefiting from it.
Lighting options have changed dramatically in recent years, driven by changing consumer tastes and rapidly developing technology. Designs were previously driven by the size of light bulbs, the sockets they fit into and the shades that could cover them up. Now, though, LED lighting enables us to have plenty of light from shapes and sizes we never imagined could even be light sources.
“Form follows function, and you had to cover (bulbs and sockets). Now you don’t have to cover anything,” said Andy Singer, who founded Houstonbased Visual Comfort Lighting & Co. in 1987.
“The LED can be 1 millimeter in diameter. It can be long and skinny or a disc or fit into almost anything you can imagine or even made to disappear.”
So when there are virtually no boundaries for designers, they step up to create functional and artful lighting collections for manufacturers.
Randy Powers, of Houston-based J. Randall Powers Interior Design, started designing lighting for Visual Comfort after Singer hired him to decorate his Houston home years ago. His current pieces are pared down, whether you’d call them traditional or contemporary.
Twenty high-end designers create lighting for Visual Comfort, including Lauren Rottet, Christopher Spitzmiller, Aerin Lauder, Alexa Hampton, Kelly Wearstler and Michael S. Smith.
“What we see in our own product line is, the simpler and sleeker, the faster it sells. I still get hung up thinking I have to do a gorgeous crystal chandelier. It sells but not as quickly as a candlestick that’s simple and plain,” Powers said. “My Hackney lamp couldn’t be more simple, and it’s a big seller.”
You can easily add contemporary lighting to a traditional home for a result that is familiar but more sophisticated and architectural, Singer said.
Martyn Lawrence Bullard has worked on homes for Kris Jenner and a few of her Jenner/Kardashian daughters, and designs everything from fabric to lighting. His newest collection for Corbett Lighting taps into the more modernist trends appealing to homeowners and designers alike.
Bullard’s black basketweave Caba Caba fixtures tap into the need for more organic materials, his Rhodos chandelier displays a popular Sputnikshaped midcentury vibe, and his dramatic gold-leaf Featherette group brings on the wow factor. All are hot trends in lighting.
“I do think that there are cycles to taste — you know there are probably half a dozen overreaching themes in style, modern and maybe softer vintage modern or midcentury, then there’s the transitional movement, and you see a lot of farmhouse-y projects,” Singer said. “One of the biggest changes I’ve seen is how traditional has gone from being a Georgian — Victorian, even — layer after layer of (details) to a cleaner traditional, a more modern, edited version of traditional.
That, I think, is probably the biggest change.”
On one level, it means traditional styles such as a lantern pendant or crystal chandelier get pared down, stripped of frills and ornamentation. But it also means that you’ll see brand-new styles — things that make you tilt your head and ask, “That’s a light?”
When Houston interior designers LeTricia Wilbanks and Selena Mackay shopped the Milan Furniture Fair (the Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano) market for their new The W.M. design showroom, they thought they were looking at a new branch of design. There were chandeliers with tiny lights tucked inside crystal drops and lights grouped like a rain shower, and they were from brands many Americans might not have heard of — Serip (Portuguese), Terzani (Italian) and Bover (Spanish).
“Some of the trends we noticed are that people are layering their light fixtures. Instead of one light in the center of the room, they’re doing a menagerie of lights layered or staggered. There might be five giant cylinders across a family room,” Wilbanks said. “People used to do this with accessories, staggering their height. Now they’re doing it with chandeliers and big pendants.”
The W.M. will initially have Bullard’s Corbett Lighting and fixtures from Arteriors, and eventually she and Mackay hope to add European lines that otherwise can’t be found here.
“You can do cool shapes now. You can have a zigzag or a light inside the radius of a circle. You can inset LED strips in any shape. That gives you complete freedom in design: If you can think it up, you can do it,” Wilbanks added.
Singer, whose company recruits top designers to create lighting, agreed.
“The industry is progressing from the standpoint of creativity with this technology, and that’s the exciting part of this. There’s a whole new generation
and a whole new world of product designers who are putting their spin on things that couldn’t have been done years ago,” Singer said.
The right lighting can make a traditional home look updated and more contemporary, and more creative lighting can supplement art in any room.
“The thing with lighting is, you can have a traditional house and — like with contemporary art — use it to up your game by using lighting with clean lines and a slightly more updated feel,” Powers said. “Heavy ornamentation is not where it’s headed right now.”
Not only is the overall form important, but so is the metal finish, and Powers said warm metals — brass or gold leaf, for example — are a big seller.
“There was a time when you couldn’t give away polished brass, and now it’s the No. 1 finish,” Powers said, noting that he urges people to buy untreated brass and polish it themselves or let it attain a patina over time. “People are getting tired of nickel, and you’re seeing gold not just in lighting but across the board — in plumbing, hardware and furniture. It’s funny how everything will always come back.”