Light up your dinning room or foyer with a custom chandelier by Brightwire Designs — Brightwire Designs

Looking for something special to hang above your dining room table? This post is about the custom chandeliers I have made over the past few years.

Considering how many lights I’ve made recently, it’s surprising even to me how few of them are chandeliers. “Multi-bulb hanging lights,” is what I prefer to call them. “Chandelier” is too old-fashioned. The word itself is gaudy, dripping with phonetic crystals. It is however a little more economic and less technical than “multi-bulb hanging lights,” so I guess I’ll stick with it for this post.

I have beaten the garbage man to more than one curbside chandelier in my day, and most of those pieces I dismantled and scavenged for parts. Ironically, none of the custom chandeliers I have built actually incorporate any of those parts. The problem with accumulating scavenged parts is that it can lead to endless tinkering. And there’s a fine line between useful, creative design work and tinkering a good idea into oblivion. I usually spend way more time designing the structural support, the bones of the piece than I spend making what I consider the more beautiful parts. That’s probably the reason I don’t spend a lot of time chasing chandelier business. It’s too difficult to determine how long they will take for me to build, and I end up pricing them too low.    

My first custom chandelier was actually one of my first lights of any kind, and it hung over our dining room table for a long time. Looking closely you can see that the EDM wire I used is much more gray than the shiny silver stuff I currently use. That’s because it had been run through the EDM machine and dumped at the recycle center where I found it. It was basically very dirty. It also incorporates way more wire than I would use on a similar design, today.