When trying to use a chandelier as a focal point in your home, the real challenge is choosing the right piece for its purpose. You don’t want to create a negative focal point, but rather one that your houseguests will admire and compliment you on.
After you’ve chosen your chandelier’s site, how do you use this living space without the fixture dominating it? One way to accomplish this is to keep your ceiling height in mind.
Friendly and inviting
If you have high ceilings, you’ll want to have a long enough chain to hang your fixture as low as you want. Your chandelier will fill in some of the open space toward the top of your room, making the general feel of the room friendly and inviting. As a general rule, you will want to have the bottom of the chandelier about eight feet above the floor.
If you have low ceilings, you will want to be very careful with your selection. No one should have to duck around a chandelier just to walk through the room. Low-hanging chandeliers can make an open room feel strangely cluttered not to mention frustrate taller folks.
Dining rooms are an exception to this rule. Depending on your set-up, the bottom of the fixture should hang between 24 inches and 36 inches above the table surface.
Traditional or contemporary
Your style will be reflected in your home and in the room you plan to install the chandelier. Whether your home is traditional or contemporary, rustic or retro, there’s a chandelier to match your décor.
A great way to bring attention to your chandelier is to highlight and fit the flavour of your room without overpowering it. If the design that catches your eye is popular now but overly decorative, take the basic idea and scale it down a few notches. This way, you don’t have to worry about getting tired of the fixture or that visitors will think your chandelier is overpowering the rest of your beautiful room.
Attract equal attention
Also, if you have a larger living space for chandeliers, it’s a good idea to follow a simple rule of thumb: Choose an odd number of fixtures for any one room. An even number of chandeliers in the same room (say, two) will attract equal attention, but a single fixture will stand out and draws the eye as a focus in the room. It’s a subtle, but effective, design recipe.
Styles come and go, but chandeliers are here to stay. And providing your room with a focal point like a chandelier is an ideal way of expressing your inner designer while illuminating your room the way you want it to.
