Pendant Lighting: Let Your Style Shine Bright

Light is essential to home design, and you can achieve a lot by choosing well. Both the lighting fixtures you choose, and the light itself can play a huge role in the overall look and feel of your place. Pendant lights are a popular choice for many homeowners, and if chosen well, they can be just the design elements you need to complete the look of your space.

Pendant lights are fixtures that hang down from the ceiling, either by a cord, a chain or a metal rod, directing lights downwards on the space below them, providing the perfect ambient or task lighting for almost any room. Though they are widely used in kitchens, over the kitchen island, pendant lamps can be a beautiful and useful addition to your living room, your bedroom, your home office, even your bathroom.

How to Choose the Right Ceiling Pendants?

When you are installing the lighting in your home, of course first you’ll have to think about how much light you need in which room, and where in the room. And, once you’ve determined this, it’s time to pick the perfect ceiling pendant lamps to achieve it. Though this may not be the easiest task, since they come in such a wide variety of sizes, shapes and styles, there are some ways to narrow down your options before going on a long and painful pendant lights online hunt.

Style

Apart from thinking it’s pretty when you are looking at it, one other important thing that should help you narrow down your selection is the style of your home. Choose a ceiling pendant that will complement the existing look of the room it’s placed in. Though you probably want your pendant light to stand out with its beauty, what you certainly don’t want is for it to jump out as something that’s out of place.

For instance, if you want to infuse warmth in a minimalistic and contemporary interior, you can pick delicate pendants with finishes in light colours and with soft silhouettes. If you want to add a dramatic touch to a lush and extravagant interior – a gleaming glass pendant will definitely steal the spotlight. But if you already have some lighting in place and are simply adding pendant lights, use the existing fixtures as a starting point, and make sure they are matching.

Size

Once you know the look you want to achieve, it’s time to consider the size of the fixture. The size of pendant lights can be categorised roughly, as mini –no more than 25 cm across, medium – between 25 and 50 cm across, and large – more than 50 cm. Though the size you choose should also reflect your own taste, there are some other things you should consider before jumping up ordering that some huge crazy pendant you love. Things like the overall size of the room where you’ll be hanging the pendant light or lights, the ceiling height, the size of the item over which it will be hanging etc. should all be taken into account when you’re trying to find ceiling pendant lamps.

Placement

Once you’ve decided where approximately you want your lights to be – whether it’s over the kitchen island, the bar, a table…, in order to space it correctly, you should find the centre of whatever it will be hanging above. This will be your reference point for positioning the ceiling pendant light or lights. If you are placing more than one fixtures, the goal is to space them evenly over the item you’ve chosen to put it over, and for this, you’ll need to measure the space.

Once you have the measurements, if you are installing an odd number of pendants (typically three), first put the middle one directly at the centre, and then use the measurements to space the other ones evenly. If you are hanging even number of ceiling pendant lights, you should once again space them out evenly, finding the centre and then determining where you should position them. Once you’ve made these measurements, you can finally transfer them to the ceiling, and let your electrician begin the installation.

Height

Another thing you should think about is how high you want to position the pendant lamp. In a kitchen, the distance between the countertop and the bottom of the pendant should be between 75 and 85 cm. Or, if you have one centrepiece pendant in your living room, the distance between the floor and the bottom of the lamp should be 210 cm.

Nevertheless, when you are designing your home, you should allow yourself to break the rules, if you want to. Some people will hang ceiling pendants at different heights, some will position them asymmetrically. So, go ahead and play with the positioning of the pendants, the height, the sizes, the shapes, and let yourself be unique. After all, your home should be a reflection of your personality and your style. However, you should watch out not to hang your pendant lights so low that you’d be looking directly into the light bulb, or that they would obstruct the view.

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