Something Old is New Again: Repurposing a Vintage Pendant Lamp



Photo by Thomas Underhill. Interior Styling by Victor Underhill

 





Sometimes when you’re faced with a vintage piece that isn’t working for your space, the best thing to do is change things up. Case in point: Our Danish modern pendant lamp.




Lamp in its original configuration as seen in our old house

 

Here’s a photo of the room where our lamp used to live, and it looked great in that space. As you can see, the fixture consisted of a beautiful, horizontal piece of walnut, from which three hand-blown glass pendants were suspended, the center one a bit lower than the others. Try as we might, we couldn’t make this lamp work with the slanted ceilings in our Cliff May Rancho. Its horizontal configuration just didn’t look right.

Disclaimer: We don’t necessarily advocate molesting vintage furniture, décor and artwork, which we compare to cutting up a Picasso and using it for a decoupage project. But this poor lamp had already been through the proverbial ringer. My husband broke the middle pendant by slamming into it with his head (ouch!) when we were in the process of moving out of our last home. We had the pendant replaced by a talented glassblower, Josh Gelfand of Revolution Glass Studio in El Segundo, who did a marvelous job of reproducing the broken shade. So while the lamp looked beautiful again, it was no longer original. This made the decision to change its configuration from horizontal to vertical a bit easier for us. Here’s how we pulled it off.

First, we ordered a pendant fixture from Modernica. It’s designed to suspend George Nelson bubble lamps, but we figured it would work well for our project. We knew where we wanted the lamp to go: in the northeast corner of the room we’ve dubbed “The Salon,” where it would look marvelous from every angle, including looking in from outside on the patio.




Interior stylist The Divine Victor Underhill

 

Our interior stylist, The Divine Victor Underhill, was the brains behind this project. He determined exactly where on the ceiling the repurposed lamp would be located, so that it would be framed by either of the two corner windowpanes when being viewed from outside. Genius, he is.



Determining our arrangement before building the lamp



Before beginning to build the lamp, Victor laid the pendants down inside a large box so that he could determine how he wanted to position them. It was important that the finished configuration look gorgeous but also be constructed in such a way that the pendants wouldn’t smack into each other during an earthquake. (Those of us who live in the Los Angeles area know that earthquakes are a “when” rather than an “if” scenario.) Once he determined the arrangement, it was time to start constructing the lamp.



Almost done!



Truth be told, putting this lamp together wasn’t easy. The instructions were . . . well . . . unclear. Threading the lamp cord through the wooden balls, which were later attached to the metal armature, was difficult, because the cord had a clingy, plastic coating and the holes in the balls were snug. (We ended up having to enlarge the holes slightly by wrapping sandpaper around a pencil and then sanding them from the inside.) Once we had the whole contraption assembled it was heavy, and it took three of us to hold it—working hard to keep the pendants from whacking into each other—while Victor attached the canopy to the ceiling. We also had to take it down a couple of times to adjust the height of the pendants in order to make sure they were properly framed inside the window panes.




Pendant lamp viewed from the patio

 

In the end, all the time and effort was worth it, because, as you can see from the photo at the tip-top of this post, our repurposed pendant lamp is the star of the show in this room. At night, it greets visitors as they approach from the outside. Inside, it’s a show-stopper. We love it. And we know we made the right decision when we changed it up to better suit our needs instead of leaving it as-is and selling it to someone else. No guilt here. It’s all good.

Tips and Tricks: Steel Wool is a Girl’s Best Friend

Hello, Readers!

We’re getting closer to completion on our renovation, although we’ve run into some roadblocks, primarily in the kitchen department. The butcher block portion of our island didn’t work out. Let’s just say our contractor isn’t as skilled as he’d led us to believe. It’s been installed, but it didn’t live up to our expectations. We’ve scrapped the idea for a number of reasons and are now looking for a new contractor and fabricator to replace the butcher block with Caesarstone to match the rest of the island. 

We’re also still waiting for the delivery of our built-in convection microwave in the custom “Wasabi” color. We’re told it will be in this week. Fingers crossed. *sigh*

There will be glorious photos of the finished rooms, rest assured. In the meantime, I’ve prepared a number of little tutorials with tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way and new pointers I’ve picked up from my good friend, interior stylist—and creative genius—Victor Underhill. Here’s a sampling about the glories of steel wool. Gotta love it.

The following are two little projects in which I used the magic of steel wool to safely transform vintage metal objects into ones that look new—or a heck of a lot better—again.

Vintage trivets: 25 cents for all three at a garage sale!

Let’s start with these adorable trivets with yellow plastic feet, which I nabbed at a garage sale for 25 cents. That’s right, readers. I got them for 25 cents for the set of three! As you can see, they were grubby. Some of the black paint was loose and chipped. They were awfully sticky, too. 

Trivets before

First, I soaked the feet in some warm, soapy water to cut the grime. I was pleasantly surprised when they came out looking new.

Superfine (Grade #0000) steel wool and high-heat paint

Then I took out my secret weapon: superfine (Grade #0000) steel wool. I gently rubbed the metal until all the grime and loose paint was gone. I covered the yellow feet with painter’s tape and spray-painted the metal with high-heat spray paint. 

Vintage trivets after restoration

Voila! Take a look at the finished project. These little guys are so atomically cool that we display them on the counter, and we use them all the time to hold hot dishes straight from the oven. Form and function. What’s not to love?

Eames shell chair before restoration

Our second project involves this delicious Eames shell chair, which we purchased years ago at a furniture sale at the Palos Verdes Library. The chair’s chrome legs didn’t look terrible, but they had some corrosion and needed a little help. Steel wool to the rescue!

Notice the difference between the two legs

Again, I used the same superfine steel wool, which I gently rubbed on the legs and watched most of the corrosion disappear. (In the photo at left, the left leg has been treated with the superfine steel wool; the right leg has not. Notice the remarkable difference in shine and texture.) This took some elbow grease, I’ll admit, but it was worth it. A word of warning, though, with a project like this: Wear a mask—the inexpensive type that can be had at any hardware store. Using steel wool on chrome does create a fine dust, which is best left outside of one’s lungs. 

Eames shell chair after restoration

Once I finished sprucing up the legs, I cleaned the upholstery up with saddle soap, which I’ll talk about in another post. Saddle soap is a great tool to have in your vintage-furniture arsenal. If you haven’t used it, you won’t believe what it can do.