De Beauvoir’s description beautifully captures the glamour a glittering cascade of lit glass can bestow on a social event. Chandeliers are made to be opulent, yet for a while consumers fell out of love with opulence, and chandeliers lost their sparkle. They were derided for being too overdressed, or froufrou, or loud—and the people who desired them similarly so. Modern homes called for pure, even austere lines and it seemed that chandeliers would be consigned to history, hanging dusty and dulled with neglect from cracked ceilings, or, if they were really lucky, winning a bit-part in a period drama.
Recently, though, chandeliers have reclaimed their top billing as the ultimate showstopper, largely because internationally renowned artists are creating bespoke pieces of breathtaking audacity and enduring desirability for private residences, restaurants, hotels, clubs, theaters, and places of worship.
These range from the fun and quirky—such as those produced by husband-and-wife team Katy and Charlie Napier, founders of UK-based Sunbeam Jackie, who use resin-coated vintage and designer fabrics to create exuberant, stained-glass-effect lighting—to vast lead-crystal orbs and fruit bowls that push glassmaking to its limits.
One company that has been at the vanguard of chandelier and mirror design for nearly 200 years is London-based Rocco Borghese. “My great, great, great grandfather, Virginio, set up a foundry in northern Italy making forged iron and glass pieces in 1824,” says general manager Gino Borghese, “and one generation after another has followed in his footsteps. My father, Rocco, is still at the helm—he creates most of our bespoke work, though I’m becoming much more involved in that side of the business now. Some of our most popular designs are decades old, but we adapt each one to accommodate the brief. Our contemporary chandeliers are lighting sculptures. They share the same DNA as our traditional ones, but really they are works of art—timeless investment pieces.”
Rocco Borghese’s recent commissions have come from Annabel’s, the private club in London’s Mayfair; shoe designer Sophia Webster, who asked for a flamingo-themed chandelier; the Rome Italy Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; and one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors, who wanted a piece installed in the stairwell of his home.
“Each project had its own challenges, but the Temple commission was monumental,” says Borghese. “We made 172 chandeliers using Swarovski crystal, 24-karat gold leaf, and fused, molded, and blown glass from Murano. They’re jewels—I can’t think of a better way to describe them.”
The process of commissioning a chandelier starts with a meeting with the designers and then an assessment by the design team of the space for which the sculpture is intended.
Typically, designs are inspired by nature; pebbles, raindrops, flowers, stars, and shells are common starting points. Some clients will have a clear idea of what they want—for example, one person wanted a Rocco Borghese classic, a piece that features glass sea flowers, to be made using butterflies instead—while others will leave things solely in the hands of the experts.
After that, and before several prototypes are produced, clients will be able to see their chandelier in situ, using a digital mock-up. Next comes the process of making the piece. Each component, such as a teardrop or shard, is made individually at the glassworks. This is an extremely skilled and complex process. Many of the pieces will need to have a channel in the middle for electric wiring, while others will have gold or silver dust applied, or will be made to a design that’s never been created before. A chandelier can comprise thousands of glass elements and only once they are all finished can the assembly start. The pieces will be wired together, and then the entire sculpture shipped to its destination where a specialist team will be waiting to install it.
In New York, Jeff Zimmerman, who is represented by R & Company, has worked on hundreds of commissions for public and residential properties throughout the world, including for the Hyundai Capital headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. His deeply seductive lighting art pieces are born from nature but, as he says, from nature as it might appear on an alien planet. Zimmerman’s hand-blown installations exploit the qualities of glass to the max: in that small window that exists between glass transitioning from molten to solid, he pulls, spins, and makes it collapse into itself to create the rippling, organic forms for his chandeliers. “I know that if I blow a bubble up very, very thin, I can allow natural actions to design with me,” he said in an interview he gave some years ago. “It’s a combination of having intent and letting go.”
To create a bespoke lighting sculpture, the artists need be in tune both with the desires of their clients, and with the space itself. That, as much as anything, will dictate the design, as Lisa Hinderdael, operations partner at Design Haus Liberty—an integrated architecture, interior design, lighting, and branding practice with offices in London and Hong Kong—explains: “We created The Pour for a client in Tribeca, New York, whose living room had two columns at either end of a dropped beam. We could see immediately what that space needed—a shower of light that would pour down from the beam and land in puddles on the floor. We went with double-thickness hand-blown teardrops with integrated LED bulbs housed in the caps, which we thought would better replicate the effect of rain and how it magnifies and diffuses light.”
Erin Boisson Aries, Associate Broker at Christie’s International Real Estate Group, feels that the relationship between the size and scale of the chandelier and the height of the ceiling is paramount. “We’re currently marketing a property in a stunning building in New York,” she says, “where the custom-designed chandelier hanging in the lobby was designed in collaboration with preeminent architects Foster + Partners and Lasvit, a Czech Republic lighting company known for some of the most inspired designs in the world. It is made up of hundreds of extruded glass pieces, delicately connected in a way that enables the lights above it and natural light to the side of it to play off of each other. The chandelier was created as a focal point for the building’s lobby, with its majestic 34-foot (10 m) ceiling. This grand scale and proportion of the lobby is unlike any other in the city. The chandelier achieves its aim, which was to mark a sense of arrival to an incredible building and space.”
