Modern lighting is not necessarily about abandoning tradition. Some of the most compelling pieces being made today take centuries-old materials, techniques and forms and push them somewhere genuinely unexpected – a mid-century silhouette revived in new proportions, a historic glasshouse...
Luxury chandeliers have always been about more than illumination. Louis XIV filled Versailles with solid silver furniture, chandeliers among them, in an ostentatious display of royal power. A century later in Bohemia, the Maria Theresa chandelier was created to mark...
The same piece of Venetian glass can look like two different objects in a single day. Seen against morning light through an east-facing window, a chandelier's crystal drops might read as pale and watery; by evening, under warm artificial light,...
In 1688, the French writer Jean de La Bruyère recorded a small but memorable mishap in his book Les Caractères: a chandelier, hung too low, snagged the wig clean off the head of a gentleman walking beneath it. Getting the...
