Hanging a crystal chandelier is no easy task and as a Westchester County interior decorator and designer, I often see the light need for lighting in my travels. Proper lighting in homes is one of the most critical design elements for both aesthetics and for functionality.
I’m currently working on a dining room in Armonk, New York that requires something smashing! The house is a 1921 Tudor and the first room that we are working on is the formal dining room – lots of wood beams and wood trim around the leaded glass windows. Since money is not an issue, I directed my client to Schonbek, a leader in custom luxury lighting. Shonbek’s global presence is renowned in hotels, resorts and casinos as well as places of grand historical significance and of course, private homes. The company revels in a challenge and creates custom and complex lighting fixtures using Swarovski crystals of all shapes and sizes.
The fixture arrived in a crate and for some reason (silly me!) I thought that calling my electricians would be all that was required. WRONG!!! We opened the crate – very delicately of course with a screwdriver and plyers – to remove all the nails. Upon inspection of the contents I found a skeleton base with what seemed to be scores of bubble wrapped wooden boxes with hundreds of dividers! In each divider was an individual crystal, wrapped in tissue, of varying shapes and sizes. This was definitely an “OH MY ” moment!
But thankfully, underneath all of these boxes was a MAP! The map was like a connect the dots puzzle with letters and numbers assigned to each crystal and corresponding letters and numbers assigned to a rendering of the skeleton. Oh, how I always loved a geography class – NOT!
And so, the guys first hung the skeleton to the height that I directed, so that the bottom crystal of the fixture would be approximately 34″ above the top of the table and then, delicately and gingerly, one crystal at a time, we used the map to hang the crystals and to actually hand build this magnificent fixture. It took us about 3 hours to create but I must point with pride at the final result. Hanging this crystal chandelier was no easy task but it will most certainly be a focal point of my client’s dining room.
