Find out why glass pendant lights are so popular and how to make the most of this surging home decorating trend.

Contemporary home décor often incorporates a mélange of different styles from farmhouse to industrial chic, with plenty of personalizing touches that reflect your family’s unique footprint. Glass pendant lights loom large within current lighting trends, providing not only illumination but also distinctive decoration in your living spaces with a satisfying blend of form and function that unifies the diverse elements of your room. Pendant styles can add vibrancy to your carefully crafted color scheme, create individual work space or invite groups to gather for cozy conversations. When you are planning to update or redecorate your interior spaces, be sure to incorporate current lighting trends in your list of critical considerations.

Why Pendant Lighting?

A pendant light is any fixture that is suspended from the ceiling by a bar, chain or other mechanism. It is also called a suspended light or a drop fixture. One of the reasons that these types of lights are ubiquitous in both contemporary homes and commercial settings is their versatility. It doesn’t matter whether you have high or low ceilings because you can adjust the length of the fixture’s drop to fit your space.

Rather than spreading a diffuse pool of light across the ceiling like a flush mounted fixture tends to do, pendant styles typically direct the light downward and outward to some degree. When you can aim your light directly where you want it, it becomes a home décor element as well as a functional one, defining your living spaces with the nuances of style and depth.

Among the myriad other factors that make pendant lighting so popular with home decorators is the huge selection of styles, materials and colors that are available from today’s lighting manufacturers, which makes it easier than ever to find just what you have in mind. Suspended fixtures come in a vast range of sizes, from mini pendants that are perfect above a desk to foyer-sized pendants that make grand statements. The pricing is similarly diverse, so chances are good that you will find a robust selection within your price range.

The Hottest Trends Glass Pendant Lights

A wealth of choices in glass pendant lights can make selection difficult but not impossible. For starters, if you pride yourself on your savvy sense of style, the must-have fixture of the year is the blown glass pendant. It’s easy to see why these are so popular because the artful aspect of blown glass infuses a room with upscale panache and handcrafted character. Designers from such time-honored manufacturers as Kovacs, Dale Tiffany and Oggetti Luce offer lots of options in these types of artisan-inspired fixtures for upgrading your décor.

The glass itself may be hand-blown or look as though it is. This hand-crafted aspect communicates a custom vibe that is an essential element in contemporary homes. The appearance of the glass shades in these fixtures can be clear, seeded, stained, leaded, tinted or opaque, providing plenty of decorating possibilities. Some of the most popular shapes for blown glass pendant shades are:

• Spheres
• Half-spheres
• Flattened spheres or urchins
• Ovals
• Bells
• Cylinders
• Irregular shapes that suggest hand-blown origins

In response to the trend toward multiple pendant installations for kitchen island lights and bathroom pendants, a sizeable array of multi-light fixtures are available, such as the Nest designs from Fine Art Lamps, multi-pendant designs from ELK Lighting, and cascading pendant clusters from Elan.

When you go shopping for pendants, you’ll see a charming trend that translates beautifully across lighting styles and profiles. Many manufacturers are equipping their fixtures with vintage-look Edison bulbs that really add decorative distinction to a variety of installations. A charming mixture of energy efficiency and retro authenticity, these LED bulbs feature the distinctive squirrel-cage filaments that are the hallmark of actual Edison-era lights. They come in an array of shapes, ranging from traditional to spherical, and they emit a warm glow that adds to the comforting aura of your home environment.

Working Your Fixtures for Fabulous Effects

With some imagination, artful inspiration and, in many cases, advice from your favorite interior designer, you can leverage your lighting choices for optimal effect. Some of the pendant fixture applications you’ll typically see in contemporary homes include:

• Kitchen island lights
• Bathroom pendants above the counter or over a soaking tub
• A statement suspended fixture in the foyer
• Upscale dining room lighting
• Seating area pendants

The key to a successful lighting array in any of these situations is correct sizing of one or more fixtures to produce the amount of illumination you need. Sometimes there is a subtle line between effectively dispelling shadows and making an area uncomfortably bright. Dimmer switches can provide an effective solution to brightness issues in many cases, but it is also important that you start out with the number and size of pendants appropriate to the space.

For example, for kitchen island lighting, you should have the measurements of the island table top space. One strategy for determining the most pleasing number of pendants in this particular application is to divide the space into two or three segments, and then choose the same number of pendants, provided each is sufficient to illuminate its portion of the counter space. Of course, you can adjust the length of the suspenders up or down for more or less intensive light or to adjust the overall footprint, keeping in mind that the kitchen island is a workspace as well as a seating area, so it should be fully lit.

For a conversation space, however, whether in a quiet corner of your great room or in the master suite, you may want the kind of softer lighting that encourages intimacy. A cluster fixture with an artful cascade of mini lights is an ideal option, creating a rarified space that glows with warmth, comfort and sociability.

In the bath, you can light up your favorite features, such as vessel sinks and your slipper tub, with statement pendant styles that reinforce a luxurious atmosphere of ultimate relaxation. For example, a circular fixture with a trio of suspended globes from Sonneman or Hinkley Lighting highlights the upscale trend in contemporary spa-style bathrooms.

Glass Pendant Lights for Beautiful Homes

Decorating with light is a wonderful way to refresh every room in your home, and by tapping into the rapidly growing pendant trend, you can access a wealth of options in terms of function, style, size and profile for personalizing your family’s habitat. Browse our eclectic collection of trend-friendly fixtures at 1800Lighting.com to get started today.