The details of a remodel add up to the whole design. Choose something too trendy and your home will forever whisper (or yell) “The 2025 Remodel.” So how can you pick Mid-Century Light Fixtures that will keep your remodel timeless? And maybe even turn up the volume on it’s mid mod charm?
Track lights along the exposed beams say “80’s update.” Tiffany glass dining table pendants give a definitive “1995 remodel.” Blown glass pendant lighting over a granite counter top tells me it’s from the early 2000’s. You don’t want the same time stamp on the remodel you’re planning right now.
Fortunately we can have SO MUCH FUN picking out authentic and lovely reproduction mid-century light fixtures. Here’s your best practice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to avoid time-stamped lighting
Pick from this array of good options:
- Source vintage mid-century designer pieces
- Pick mid-century designed fixtures still licensed for production
- Hunt down authentic but non-name brand vintage lights
- Choose modern options but lean on your mid-century style guide!
Don’t forget to design the lighting, not just pick lights
Mid-century homes weren’t built with an excess of wired in and switched light fixtures, and that’s part of their charm! Many of us find our homes a bit too dim for modern living. Fair. But lighting a mid-century home is an art.
Instead of filling every ceiling with recessed can lights (please don’t!), check out this companion post about about how to layer your lighting for both function and atmosphere.
Designer Mid-Century Light Fixtures still in production
If you want to set the tone for your whole house, one or two signature light fixtures – a dramatic pendant in dining room or entry, something visible from the front door or even from the sidewalk is a great way to set the tone!
You can have a lot of fun looking for mid-century light fixtures. To get you going, here’s a roundup of some of my favorite high drama, high design fixtures and lamps.
AJ lamp, both table and floor models. Designed by Arne Jacobsen for his building the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen 1957.
Artichoke Pendant, designed in 1958 by Poul Henningsen for the Langelinie Pavillonen, a modernist Copenhagen restaurant. Constructed of 72 radiating leaves that shield the eye from the light inside.
Arco Floor Lamp. You’ve seen knock offs of this EVERYWHERE. The original, designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1962, as a heavy base of carrera marble block, then a long half circle arc of stainless steel and a slightly more than half hemisphere reflector that directs light down.
Nelson Bubble Lamp(s). There are many different shape varieties of these, all delightful. The first was designed by George Nelson in 1952 for his own office and all of the bubble lamps use a translucent white polymer that holds it’s shape (with a little subtle ribbing). Check out the Saucer, the Ball, The Crisscross, the Cigar, and the Propellor.
Vintage Fixtures from named designers
Alternately you can guarantee an authentic result (and provenance) if you go through mid-century dealers or online marketplaces like 1stDibs for one off or found original pieces.
All of these sconce designs showed up in a cursory sweep of 1stDibs recently.
Don’t forget to check Antique Malls, Estate Sales, Etsy and FB Marketplace
There are plenty of GREAT mid-century light designs that don’t have a named designer (of course someone DID create them but … we’ll never be able to thank them nominally). Your mid-century home may even have COME with a few of these intact. If it didn’t, you can hunt up replacement pieces on Etsy or Fb Marketplace … or go out looking in person at your local ReStore, Antique Mall or the occasional Estate Sale.
This type of pull down pendant (often with a flying saucer profile) is great for a dining table. It has a tension mechanism that lets you tug the light low for an intimate dinner or push it up and out of the way so no one bops their head on it if the table is moved. These fixtures often have a combination of metal and glass or – like this one – just a reflector design. Bulbs hidden by the lower metal pan shine light up into the lighter upper dish which then gets gently bounced back down onto the table.
Don’t forget modern reproductions
Etsy is likely your go-to for the most fun and fanciful pieces.
You can choose your wood, metal and shade colors and have a modern light fixture (possibly even with smart tech built in) shipped to your home. I’ve seen this Rocket Lamp profile in antique malls but ALSO you can find a similar design on Etsy. So don’t hesitate to search!
Listen Now On
Quick design tip for…a great addition.
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
TV Lamps
Resources
- Grab my additions checklist to make sure you’re all se tot add on!
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass! I’m going live on February 22nd with “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”. Save your seat today!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
A few weeks ago, I talked you through creating welcoming and multipurpose lighting conditions for your mid-century home. How to differentiate between general and task lighting. How many switches might be too many switches, and how to create a lighting setup for every mood and time of day today, let’s piggyback on that topic by talking about the mid-century light fixtures that you can choose to give you that light and also to add authenticity, character and fun to your home update.
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mount remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2006 and since today’s episode is going to include a lot of references to design history, to specific products or types of lighting, to general styles of mid-century light fixtures, you’re likely going to want to hit up the show notes for this page for pictures and links.
Della Hansmann
Find that all at mid mod midwest.com/ 206, before we get into a list of light fixtures and also the theory behind choosing the right moment in history, the right style, the right materiality, etc., for your house. Of course, I’m gonna give you theory before we get into that. Two things.
Della Hansmann
First, a little news. Last weekend, we had so much fun at the mid-century kitchen clinic, people tuned in to talk about their kitchens from all over the country, and we had an absolutely amazing Q and A really great questions at the end of the main workshop that lasted nearly an extra hour. If you missed it, you can always get access to the replay recording. There will be a link in the show notes, and you can also use the learn with us tab on the mid mod Midwest home page to find all of our mid-century design clinic recordings from the past.
Della Hansmann
That’s exterior updates, additions, decks and patios, and more especially, I recommend the more than a mood board clinic if you’re interested in choosing the right light fixtures for your mid-century home. That clinic specifically talks about setting up your style guide and all that’s entailed in focusing your choices from everything available, from all of history and the entire internet to the right choices for you and your house, you’ll never regret simplifying your life in that way.
Della Hansmann
You can find all of those and you can register for our free upcoming master class at that learn with us. Tab the master class. By the way, planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget is coming up again live. As you know, I give this class just a few times a year live, and that time is coming up for regular listeners of the podcast, this class is so useful because I’ll walk you through the Master Plan framework that gives context and a step by step process to all of the popcorn elements of great ideas that an individual episode will cover.
Della Hansmann
If you’ve never attended this class, I hope you show up live this time, quickly the planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget. Master Class. A mouthful. Think of it as the mid-century master class is a complete free training on a, why your mid-century house is so great. B, what’s going on in the world of design and remodeling right now?
Della Hansmann
That makes it a legitimate challenge to anyone who wants to plan a remodel for a mid-century house without steam rolling right over those great, original features and qualities that you love in it, and see how you can plan a remodel that fits your life, your budget, and keeps or puts back mid-century character into your house. It is 60 minutes of helpful encouragement, step by step processes and as much of the everything I’ve learned in a career in residential design and nearly a decade of mid-century remodels that I can share with you to get you on the road to a remodel you will never regret.
Della Hansmann
This class is a must for anyone planning any improvements to your home, large or small in the near future. If you’re going to call a contractor and take on a big home overhaul of the entire house or one space. Don’t miss this class. And if you’re just planning to tweak a few things with a couple of weekend DIY efforts, things about your entry, your kitchen, your living spaces, your mudroom, your storage, come to this class and get inspired for how you can get the biggest bang for your buck and your effort.
Della Hansmann
I usually leave a recording of this class live on my website for anyone to check out when they need it. But while I tune up the material and make sure it’s all the most up to date, I’ve taken that recording down, so go sign up and save your seat for the updated live class right now at mid mod midwest.com/sign up and then make a plan to show up live a week from Saturday at 11am Central for an hour on getting ready to really love your home.
Della Hansmann
And here is our mid mod design tip of the week. Let’s talk about how to plan properly for an addition. The great news is that your mid-century home was designed to be easily added on to. But that doesn’t mean bigger is better. You want to decide if you really need to add on, know your limits and keep it simple to plan the perfect addition to your home.
Della Hansmann
By the way, this particular tip is true for a lot of different home improvement projects around a mid-century home not just adding on, but in general, additions are a lot of time, money and energy to create. So how can you make sure that that effort, that trouble, that expense of an addition gets as much benefit for you as possible?
Della Hansmann
So and ideally, an addition adds not just square footage, but greater functionality to your home. It might improve your exterior esthetic, help create privacy in your yard from a too close neighbor, or make the existing spaces work better, as well as adding in new spaces. So for example, if you’re pushing out an addition into part of your yard, you’re changing the letter of your house from a simple rectangle or an i into an L, or from an L to a C, or an S or a Z. So what are you going to get, not just from the finished interior space, but around the edges of the house?
Della Hansmann
By creating that new shape, you might be able to create a better patio or deck or covered porch by enclosing part of your backyard with an L shaped addition. You might improve your home’s passive solar potential. You might cut off your least favorite view, your most farmhouse neighbor. You might also use a small addition to the footprint to scoot around interior spaces to make what you already have work better.
Della Hansmann
The bottom line is that for any addition, you want to turn it into a scone that can feed more than one bird or purpose in your life, feed two birds with one scone is my favorite alternative to kill two birds with one stone, which is such a violent metaphor of efficiency anyway, when you’re thinking about making the most out of a new space or of any change in your house, ask yourself, what other problems besides not enough square footage.
Della Hansmann
Do I need to solve around my house and my yard? Do I feel like the views surrounding my property are working to their best? How can my addition help with that? And how will any added space help blend with existing interior space? Can I use part or all of the addition to enhance those existing spaces? One of the examples I shared in the mid-century kitchen clinic this weekend was one of my very favorite early, early projects of a master plan. We wanted to create more space in the kitchen, but also really condense the budget.
Della Hansmann
And so we ended up doing was not changing the footprint of the kitchen at all. All of the working spaces of the kitchen stayed in the relatively small original mid-century footprint, but we opened up a wall which had been facing the backyard to a new added on den, and we doubled the counter space.
Della Hansmann
What it had been wall facing became a peninsula looking out into a lovely new den space. So we were able to double the feeling of the size of the kitchen without doing any expensive build a brand new kitchen and brand new footprint adding on that really allowed the simple box structure of a new post and beam elevated ceiling den looking into the backyard to do the job of also increasing the space in the kitchen.
Della Hansmann
How can you feed two birds with one scone? So if you’ve got this part dialed in, you’re ready for the rest of my pre edition checklist. Grab that in free PDF form at mid nod dash, midwest.com/editions for all of the things you should consider before adding on to a mid-century home. And of course, I’ll just link it in the show notes, which you can also find at midmod-Midwest.com/ 2006, all right.
Della Hansmann
Two weeks ago, we talked about how to think about the lighting quality in a mid-century room and acknowledging that mid-century rooms don’t have a lot of wired in lighting. They often feel dim once everything has been moved out. Once the estate sale is over and you’re looking at an empty mid-century house, it does not have a lot of light you can turn on with a switch.
Della Hansmann
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of potential for light the mid-century was an era in which people expected to furnish their home with light fixtures, as well as other types of furniture. It’s important to do what the mid-century modern folks did, and add light fixtures to your house, because you can really ruin your day to day experience by living in dimly or too harshly lit spaces. The experiential quality of living in your house is hugely affected by the lighting quality in your rooms.
Della Hansmann
To plan a really livable update to your house, or even just to look at the house you have, this does not require a remodel. This might be something you take a survey of your house’s lighting in each room and judge it for its ability to be bright or pleasantly dim, for the way the shadows are cast, for the warm or cool temperature of the lighting in the spaces you could go through and make a little month by month project of tuning up the lighting at each part of your house that requires no rewiring, no calling A contractor, no electricians.
Della Hansmann
If you’re not really happy with the lighting quality in your house, I recommend actually taking this on right now. We have hard enough lives today without living in poor lighting conditions. So let’s talk today about the kind of mid-century, like fixtures you should be sourcing to solve the light problems you might identify in your house as you look around and say, this room is always too dim, or there’s only a way to be bright in this room. There’s no middle ground.
Della Hansmann
So the kind of mid-century light fixtures you choose, or the lack of mid-centuryness in the light fixtures you choose, is hugely important, because light fixtures are one of the key ways to date your remodel, and not in a Valentine’s Day way. So. The mid-century. Style of your home can be very affected by the type of light fixtures that you choose. And one of the easiest ways to data remodel, to identify the date of a previous remodel that is, is to figure out when did that incorrect remodel happen?
Della Hansmann
Was it the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s is to look at a couple of simple finishes, the countertops, the wood stain, grain and type in the cabinets, the flooring and the light fixtures. There are certain lighting trends that took off in each of those decades and were suddenly everywhere and then suddenly incredibly played out.
Della Hansmann
For example, we’ve talked about how there’s often not enough light and a quick fix solution, particularly for post and beam structures, in remodels done in the 70s and the 80s, even in the 90s, was to put in track lighting and to mount a track against the inner edge of one of the exposed ceiling joists and then put a number of Point Source lights along it. Now this isn’t necessarily the worst idea in the world functionality, but track lighting, one, is not esthetically pleasing to look at. It’s not a mid-century light fixture.
Della Hansmann
And two, it’s going to throw a pretty specific light. It was often used to sort of put directional task lighting in different places, but it’s mounted too high to be really effective. And again, you walk into a space that has a bunch of track lighting mounted against the beams, and you immediately know those are not mid-century light fixtures. This is not a mid-century era remodel.
Della Hansmann
This probably a 90s remodel. In the early 2000s there was a craze for adding pendants to your kitchen that had Italian imported glass shades that were multicolored, sort of a Venetian combination of materials. Often it was like little different specs of different colored glass melded together in interesting patterns. They’re quite beautiful as objects.
Della Hansmann
But again, because they were incredibly trendy, they hit their peak of popularity at a moment in the past, which was not a moment for mid-century light fixtures. So they immediately date the house. They go hand in hand with black granite countertops, and they date the house to the early 2000s rather, they date the remodel to that moment. Let’s do one more example.
Della Hansmann
In the late 90s, there was a craze for Tiffany glass lamps, and you’ll often see these in big pendant light over a dining table with a complicated sort of Art Nouveau, or possibly even Frank Lloyd Wright, more rectilinear style, multi glass, leaded glass shape. Maybe the most cheesy version of this is over a pool table at a basement that says something like pool spelled out in glass. But my parents absolutely chose one of these not did not say pool for their dining table. They thought it was really beautiful.
Della Hansmann
They put a carved oak solid shaker leg table in the dining room, and then they sponge painted, yeah, hi, mom, I know you’re listening to this. They sponge painted patterns onto the walls out of a book based on color in Italian villas. And they loved it. They loved it. It made them so happy. I enjoyed it at the time, but the house is a 1970s split level. This is the way we left the house when we moved away.
Della Hansmann
Actually, the walls were all painted white for resale value. Maybe they were painted beige for resale value. It was the suburbs. But that house, when I look back on it today, had some real potential for style. I could do it up as a late, mid-century gem, and yet, if you walked into the house, if nothing has been done to it since, I would be able to say this house was last remodeled in the late 90s, not because I was there, but because of all of the style choices, including the non mid-century light fixtures that were chosen for that house.
Della Hansmann
So I’m sure that in each of those times, just like my parents did, just like I agreed with them, people thought they were making the most stylish and correct choice to update their home. And to be perfectly frank, there is a risk that any choice we make today for a modern mid-century light fixture update, even if we think of it as mid-century as the internet will give us, or sort of, quote, unquote, Mid-century Modern, they may end up reading more 2025 than actually vintage mid-century.
Della Hansmann
It is just impossible to see outside of our own taste. In this moment. There are some things you like and that I like, that feel mid-century enough to us but will look 2025 to the future. Like I say, a certain amount of this is inevitable, but we can avoid it. And so here are a few techniques you can use individually or in combination to future proof your mid-century light fixtures.
Della Hansmann
One, you can source legitimately vintage pieces mostly or entirely. Two, you can source from modern companies that are licensed to create vintage designs, like the Nelson bubble lamp, which you would buy new, but is based on the pattern and the license design that George Nelson created. Created back in the 1960s or three you can make sure that the materiality of the light fixtures you choose is sourced from the vintage material palettes that would have been appropriate in the era of your house or in the area your house is aiming towards.
Della Hansmann
This is where your style guide is going to come into focus. And there’s always the freedom to just choose what you like. Of course, I don’t recommend that you intentionally choose a style that is not mid-century, non mid-century. Light fixtures chosen specifically from some other era will diminish the quality of your house. You’re never going to turn it into a different style of house.
Della Hansmann
But if you’re listening to this episode right now, you’re probably not going to make that decision anyway, so let’s go more into detail of each of those options. We can look for legitimately vintage pieces. We can look for modern reproductions, or we can use the materiality the style guide palette, to choose modern lights that are not necessarily intended to be mid-century, but will play nicely with mid-century materials, beginning with high design. Let’s talk about the reach, the things you can Google, the name brand, light fixtures and designs.
Della Hansmann
This will be a little bit of an incomplete Roundup, but some of my favorite or the things that pop to my mind when I think of name brand or designer name mid-century features, this is going to include a lot of Danish and Italian designers.
Della Hansmann
Top of mind for me is Arnie Jacobson, his AJ lamp, the desk or floor lamp, was originally designed in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. And you might know of Arnie Jacobson from his chair designs, the ant chair is a distinctive design in bent plywood, and also his egg chair, which showed up in Men in Black and in Zoolander. The AJ lamp is just such a great little plug and plaything. You can put it on your desk. It requires no design intervention whatsoever. You don’t even have to mount it from the ceiling.
Della Hansmann
And it has such a jaunty design it feels like it could easily be infused with Pixar personality, because it has such an interesting, asymmetrical character. And it just really, to me, embodies all of the qualities of great mid-century design.
Della Hansmann
For higher drama the arco floor lamp, that’s a, R, C, O, again, links to these in the show notes. This is one you’ve seen replicas or knockoffs of everywhere, probably on CD two. It has a heavy base of marble block, and then there’s a long post with a half circle arc that reaches the lamp into a center of another distant space. And the lamp shade itself, or the lamp reflector, is slightly more than half hemisphere of metal.
Della Hansmann
It’s meant to match a really open plan layout of a modernist design. You can set it up near a wall, near a plug, or at the edge of a seating arrangement, and have it land the light over a coffee table, or exactly where you sit and read this kind of high drama lamp is the sort of thing that it’s fun to draw into my renderings of people’s mid-century improvements, and just instantly going to add drama to any simple seating arrangement. If your furniture isn’t the most mid-century, a high drama mid-century lamp can pull a minimalist sofa into the mid-century era.
Della Hansmann
Let’s see when we’re thinking of drama, probably the most dramatic mid-century light that has a name brand designer, I would say, is the artichoke pendant light. This was designed by Poole Henningsen Another Dane. It has 72 leaves that radiate downward to create an artichoke shape of all these little pieces that guard your eye from the bulb that’s at the center. And it’s just, yeah, I think I think of it as almost too much for, say, an eight foot ceiling regular mid-century house, although you could, you could make it the centerpiece of your space, or if you’ve got a tall entry area, or for any kind of a commercial mid-century space, the artichoke pendant light is just an absolutely high drama piece for me.
Della Hansmann
Though, I say it reads a little busy of Poole Henningsen work. I prefer the pH five. This was designed in 1958 as a counter reaction to his irritation that the bulb manufacturers were making a bunch of different shapes and size. So he designed a sort of a dining table down lamp that would it had a series of flying saucer shape shallow dishes, some of which point up, some of which point down, and it diffuses light and aims it downward and up into the room in all different directions, while protecting your eye from every direction.
Della Hansmann
It is so elegant and gorgeous again, go check out the show notes page or Google it. It’s a little more subtle, but I think could be a really lovely signature piece, or it’s quiet enough that you could use it over an eat in table, as well as a dining table. Or instead, I wouldn’t recommend having the same light fixture in multiple places around your house, especially if it’s one of these name brand pendants. For one thing, it’ll be expensive, but for another, it would sort of dim.
Della Hansmann
Finish the iconic individual style, speaking of, okay, so thinking of sort of your art, your centerpiece design, the Sputnik chandelier. The original. The first Sputnik chandelier was designed by geo Geno Scarlatti. This is a guy who trained as an engineer and later as a lighting designer. So he created the first of these that balanced a bunch of different spokes that all came out from a different from one pendant point.
Della Hansmann
But the term now applies to any chandelier type fixture that has a bunch of radiating spokes or arms with a bunch of multiple bulbs or globe style lights at the end of each arm. And this just yeah, it has that atomic age, that space age, cheerfulness, jauntiness, it can be a bit busy. It’s a lot for an eight foot ceiling, but if you’ve got a relatively minimalist layout, it could be the center. And if you’ve got a higher ceiling, this is a place to add a lot of light to the room. Definitely think about opaque, or rather translucent, but not transparent, bulbs and or a dimmer switch, our hero, the dimmer switch, one light, I think, is just always a winner, but is almost so everywhere that it’s it doesn’t feel quite as astonishing. It just feels like classically, elegantly cool, like the Chanel suit of mid-century.
Della Hansmann
Pendants is what George Nelson designed for Herman Miller. Herman Miller, in general, is a place to go for iconic mid-century era designs, modern creations that are, you know, brand new furniture, brand new light fixtures. You don’t have to worry about. Is this vintage wiring? Is this vintage upholstery? It’s brand new, but it’s made in the exact same style, by the same license design as it has been since the 60s. Herman Miller just really nailed the mid-century era, the fabric design, the furniture design, the lighting design. George Nelson’s 1952 bubble lamps are iconic mid-century light fixtures.
Della Hansmann
They just they embody the era. They use a translucent white, plasticky polymer that holds a shape with a little subtle ribbing and lets a diffuse light through. So they’re really pleasant to be around. You don’t need to buy a specific type of light bulb, although you do want a good dimmer bulb that has a warm tone. These pendants come in a bunch of different shapes, each of which has bubble in the name, the saucer bubble, the ball bubble, the crisscross bubble is probably my favorite, the cigar bubble, the propeller bubble, a handful more.
Della Hansmann
Many of these famous lamps, like I say, are still licensed in production, so you can get an authentic design brand from a store like Herman Miller, and a little googling will always find you some genius original pieces. If you’re looking for authentic, mid-century era pieces that are in perfect condition and have some sort of provenance and name brand value, I would point you to a website like first dibs. This is the place to go for all the vintage name brand furniture, light fixture, decoration items.
Della Hansmann
If you pay for your privilege, you can keep an eye on first dibs for gorgeous and, in my opinion, sometimes less than gorgeous, but always comes with a pedigree attached to pieces where they were manufactured, the details of the designer. Their shipping is usually free, because the prices that I saw on a recent Scroll of light fixtures on first dibs were between a couple $1,000 and 10s of 1000s of dollars. To me, that’s a Yikes, but it might be the making of your gorgeous space for a better bargain, you can hunt down pieces like this, either name brand authentic or just cool in the wild, this is a better bet for a bargain hunter like me.
Della Hansmann
I source most of my light fixtures from Facebook marketplace, from estate sales and from vintage shops. Most of my favorite pieces that I have in my own home have come to me this way. My bedside lamp is a wall mounted dining table lamp that I found in the kitchen of an estate sale in my own neighborhood. Fun fact about this, when you when you find a lamp at an estate sale or hiding in the dingy back of a vintage store, it’s not going to be in perfect condition.
Della Hansmann
The fat, the sort of fabric Cord Cover, was quite grungy, and I had to clean it by sort of sponging it nicely, sort of over and over again with lightly soapy water. I also, when I bought this lamp, I thought it has a sort of a it’s got a flying saucer design. The top is a metal, gently curving, soft saucer, and that the bottom is glass, and it’s got a little twist on and off. It’s got three settings, small, medium, large, because it’s got three bulbs hiding on the inside.
Della Hansmann
And it also has a counterweight so you can lightly pull up and down on it and get it to come up and down from its counter weighted wall mount attachment. And I just thought it was such a cool shape, I had to have it. I also thought it was brown with a little bit of a cream pattern and some punch marks on the surface. When I got it home and cleaned it off, I realized that it was just covered in a layer of kitchen grime, maybe decades old, and it actually turned out to be black with a gold. A pattern on it, and I absolutely love it. I’ll put a picture in the show notes page.
Della Hansmann
Just happened to see that a Neighborhood House was for sale, wandered into the estate sale, bought it off the wall. It’s delight. Similarly, my very favorite item in my living room is the tension lamp that is the making of my otherwise modest little mid-century living room space, and I found that languishing in the corner, leaning up against a stall in the middle of atomic antiques here in Madison, the stall it was in is not particularly mid-century.
Della Hansmann
This is where you really find your bargains by wandering an antique mall that doesn’t specialize in mid-century and finding the one or two or three really cool mid-century pieces that are in there. Now, of course, there’s a middle ground. You can get very well prepared, reasonably priced, but slightly more expensive pieces from mid-century themed dealers who source good antiques. Clean them up, refinish them and check the electric electrical stuff for you.
Della Hansmann
I’ve got a number of favorites in the region. Up in Minneapolis, mid mod men and golden age of design are great sources. In Milwaukee. BC modern is an excellent place to go that’s only open once a month. And mid-century meow is a great spot to just find a constant, rotating source of beautiful mid-century furniture, decor items and lighting. Here in Madison, we’ve got atomic antiques. We also have rewind decor, which is a great specialty shop that has things going from the mid-century era forward into the 80s and 90s of vintage themed but atomic antiques is great because it’s a multi stall, sort of big box warehouse of vintage stuff.
Della Hansmann
Some of their booths are beautiful, curated dealership areas, and some of them are just kind of a little random collection, and that’s where I found my tension pole lamp. Got it for 90 bucks. It looked like only two of the three light fixtures worked, but actually just one of the bulbs was burned out. And it’s one of the best things I have in my house. So mid-century light fixtures exist laying about and that I want to bring us to the difference between sort of the name brand, the Sputnik, the Nelson lamp, the named designs, and just regular old vintage mid-century lamps.
Della Hansmann
So you can just walk into an estate sale and like the lamps that are there that don’t have a special name, or they just fall into a general shape category, a flying sauce or pendant lamp, or a bow tie sconce light or a globe style lamp. These don’t come from a design legacy. They don’t have provenance, but they can still absolutely be authentic additions to your mid-century light fixtures, and they will take a modern, dimmable LED bulb, just as well as anything else.
Della Hansmann
So when you’re thinking about mid-century lighting, don’t hesitate to keep or upgrade the simple ceiling lamp that you find in a mid-century bedroom is just usually a two bulb fixture with a center screw that supports a clear-ish or translucent glass dish with a little pattern on it. In my house, I had three different Pat, actually, four different patterns in the three bedrooms, in the hall light. I only really liked two of them, so I ended up replacing two of those lights shortly after I moved in with flat saucer, contemporary surface lights in an LED technology. I actually hate them.
Della Hansmann
I hate them so much I am absolutely planning to re replace them with vintage surface ceiling lights with glass shields. And what I’ll do instead, because I think I donated the original glass shields, or maybe they’re in my basement. Oh, man, who knows what’s in my basement right now, send me a DM on Instagram if your basement is also a disaster, and make me feel like less of a mess.
Della Hansmann
But you can go to Etsy, by the way, Etsy a great place to find vintage salvage lamps, much less than a website like first dibs, and find just a whole host of really lovely, simple, just the glass shield, so I can go to restore and get a ceiling mount light that takes two bulbs or three bulbs and will mount to the ceiling and then add to it any of a number of glass shields that will be really lovely that I can source from eBay, from Facebook, marketplace, from popping up in restore for a very reasonable price. That’s going to be a lot of fun for me to go forward with these things. Let’s see what are some other classic silhouettes. The rocket lamp is a table silhouette that has a sort of a tripod base and a vertical conical shape that has a little bit of a curvature to it. Sort of looks like a rocket.
Della Hansmann
You can find these, often in plastic in vintage shops, or you can go into Etsy and get a modern reproduction of a similar vintage shape that’s all wired up with fresh lighting and in a color that matches your life similarly that bow tie style. I have no idea who designed this. If you know, tell me who came up with a bow. My style light, but it’s a great, jaunty, fun multi directional mid-century light. My favorite source for them today is a reproduction shop. Hip Haven makes a really great dual bow tie sconce for outdoor or indoor use.
Della Hansmann
Yeah. So you can just kind of lean into the things that you can actually find from the era. So you’re looking in vintage shops, in estate sales on Etsy, on or rather, you can find vintage pieces on Etsy or on eBay. Or you’re looking for reproductions from places like Etsy, from modern reproduction shops. You can also look for modern sources of what’s called the mid-century branded lamps, if you carefully curate from the collection of schoolhouse electric anything with milk glass and a natural brass or color block finish Restoration Hardware, carefully selecting, but some of their more simple globe lamp fixtures can work again that milk glass and probably A lacquered, burnished brass finish.
Della Hansmann
From them. A lot of modernist furniture companies will sell what they will brand as a mid-century lamp. It’s probably not mid-century authentic, but as long as you choose the metals from your style guide, you’ll be going in the right direction. How what am I talking about there? What do I mean? Choose the metals from your style guide. Before you can do that, you have to prepare a style guide to do that.
Della Hansmann
Well, let’s see. I’ll point you first towards some vintage episodes of this podcast. If you go to season 12, episodes 1201 through 1204 are a four part series on the simple style guide system. I can also point you if you want to spend two hours and really create a style guide for yourself, check out my more than a mood board clinic I mentioned at the top of the episode. And you can get that by going to, well, I’ll put a link in the show notes but also go to the learn with us tab on our website.
Della Hansmann
The short, short version of a style guide is that it’s the material palette that you’re going to pull from, not the specific product you will select, but the type of wood grain and stain, the type of glass you will choose again and again, you might just decisively say all of the light fixtures in this house are going to be a milk glass or a frosted glass finish not clear. You might absolutely narrow down the number of metal finishes that you’ll have in the house to two or maybe three for the whole house, building off what exists if you have any mid-century original elements in the house, a brass, a bronze, stainless steel, and then making sure that all the pieces you choose come from that color palette.
Della Hansmann
To get into this more deeply is more than the episode on mid-century light fixtures can cover. But I absolutely recommend that the style guide system will save you so much stress. This is going to cut the decisions you have to make in your remodel process every single product you pick down by half, or maybe much, much more than that. And it will certainly if you’re going to be sourcing modern light fixtures to plug into your lighting palette in your house.
Della Hansmann
You want to make sure that you’re staying away from contemporary designs by using your style guide to keep the whole house cohesive. This will let you blend a little bit of every type of mid-century light fixture. I’ve just listed today a couple of name brand designer pieces for maybe pendants in the dining room or living room, or a floor lamp that’s really going to stand out. A couple of vintage sourced pieces that will add some authenticity and some playfulness, and some modern pieces that are just minimalist and fit the material palette of your style guide.
Della Hansmann
So again, to review, when you want to pull together a set of mid-century light fixtures that are going to help you achieve the lighting conditions that you want to have an experiential quality of dim and soothing and warm and cozy. Everybody sit here and let’s have a conversation bright and let’s get going. Every one of those feelings can be created with mid-century light fixtures that also, when they’re off, still contribute to the style and the tone of your whole house and make what might be a modernizing update of layout still feel very connected to the original era of your house.
Della Hansmann
Mid-century light fixtures are fun and functional. If you’re speaking of functional, if you’re sourcing vintage pieces, you might want to take them to an electrician in town and have the interior wiring reworked. This is absolutely something that can be done, and you will never know from the outside that it’s happened or just check over that the wiring is in good shape.
Della Hansmann
It is. I don’t want to over recommend what’s possible, but with a little bit of simple study wiring, simple electrical fixtures is not rocket science. It is something you can teach yourself how to do. So you can at least do a first pass and see if you think that the lighting seems like it’s in good Titian before you go forward.
Della Hansmann
Or you can think about assembling even a set of mid-century-ish modern fixtures from component pieces if you want an exact custom fit for. A particular type of sconce or bathroom pendant or another fixture of that kind. I’m curious if there is a sort of name recognition, architect, designerly, type of mid-century light fixture that I have forgotten to add to this list. Definitely let me know.
Della Hansmann
Hit me with an Instagram DM. Email me with your favorite something you found, something you’d long for, and I can add it to the show notes page or maybe put it in an Instagram story over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, though, I encourage you to think about this as something you can actively do when you’re not remodeling. You can always buy another pendant, light floor, light, table, light and just plug it in and let it go on in your house. A simple rewiring job by a handyman electrician can allow you to switch out one pendant for another, to really just change the tone of your house.
Della Hansmann
If you’re waiting on a bigger remodel, you can start to UN remodel a bad previous job, a flip or a 90s job or an 80s job, with switching out whatever light fixture you have for a mid-century light fixture either an authentic vintage piece or a modern reproduction or just something that fits the material palette of your house better.
Della Hansmann
So mid-century light fixtures are a joy. They are beautiful to look at. They are fun to work with. They often are very effective guarding your eye from the sort of horrors of modern, contemporary lighting, which has a lot of Edison bulbs where you’re burning an LED filament right into your retinas. Not a great idea shutter. They often have frosted glass or proper shades that are going to protect your eye from direct contact with the light and throw the light into really interesting places.
Della Hansmann
One thing I forgot to mention is, if you want to lean into kitsch, you should think about a mid-century TV lamp. You know what? Let’s This isn’t from the mid mod madness, but let’s do mid-century TV lamps as our mid-century house feature of the week. Where do you come down on the classic mid-century TV lamp? We’ve got one in my family that I think has a scene of cowboys. I think it’s just cowboys.
Della Hansmann
So maybe that’s a little bit less culturally inappropriate than it could be. And it’s like a printed onto a heavily vinyl or plastic scene, and it’s Lashed to the metal frame, the sort of oval shaped frame of the of the light fixture, the mid-century light fixture with leatherette cord. It’s not my favorite thing, but my dad loves it because it reminds him of his parents, and it actually gets into the practicality of a TV lamp. This was meant to prevent the feeling of just sitting completely in the dark, straining your eyes on a TV particular because older TVs were brighter and had more harsh contrast with the room.
Della Hansmann
So a TV lamp, a dim bulb set near, but not directly in the eyeline of a TV, often with a very translucent shade around it, was meant not to reflect onto the TV surface itself, but to give you a little bit more light in the room. And they were also meant to be a decorative design. They could be on when the TV was not and when they were off, they were still meant to be a focal feature of the room, but they are almost universally extremely kitschy, with scenes of somewhat culturally inappropriate other ethnicities or pilgrims or pioneers or cowboys. They were just they were sort of meant to be playful and fun, and sometimes they don’t really land anymore.
Della Hansmann
But do you have a TV lamp near your TV or just as a decor item in your house? Do you like mid-century kitsch at all? Does this sound fun or interesting to you? You could also take the shape the structure of a mid-century light fixture TV lamp and redo it with just a white or colored, translucent shape that could certainly work. But basically the concept of this a small wattage lamp that would give off just enough light so that the viewer wasn’t watching television totally in the dark, turned into this kind of icon of early 50s TV culture design, and we cannot separate the early 50s from TV culture.
Della Hansmann
I should do a whole episode on TV boxes and TV technology at some point. If that seems fun, let me send me a message and let me know you’d like to do it. But for the meantime, I’ll try to dig up a photo of my dad’s old TV lamp. It’s not in our TV room, by the way. I think it’s in his office and a couple of other kitschy, potentially cool examples of mid-century light fixtures that are TV lamps for your viewing delectation and throw them onto the show notes page as well. That’s about it for our episode on mid-century light fixtures.
Della Hansmann
Remember, this is absolutely one where you want to head over to the show notes page and check out photos and links to some of the name brand designers and modern sources that you could think about, but I think you’ll have your most fun in hunting down vintage finds in person at estate sales and in vintage if you’ve got the time and the shoe leather for that or the internet will always do this for you. Facebook, marketplace and Etsy are great places, and eBay are great. Is to look for that kind of low budget vintage mind, and if you want to source the authenticity of it, give yourself a little vicarious enjoyment by checking out first dibs for the high end information and high end prices.
Della Hansmann
Whether you’re thinking of a bigger remodel to your house or any kind of tweaking or changing of your house at all in the near future, you can always improve the quality of your life with a mid-century light fixture or two, or by overhauling your whole house for mid-century light fixtures all at once, or gradually, step by step. And if you’re excited about thinking about making changes to your house big or small, I hope you will show up for the planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and Budget Master class next weekend, not this Saturday, but a week from Saturday, at 11am Central.
Della Hansmann
This is it’s kind of I think of it as the Super Bowl of the mid-century crowd. It’s our chance to get together for you to see a whole bunch of other mid-century lovers in the room with you, in the zoom with you. Feel like other people care about their houses, like you care about your house and you are not alone in this endeavor.
Della Hansmann
It’s the live action version of this podcast, so you can always get yourself signed up for that by going to mid ma midwest.com/sign up. I really hope I’ll see you there, and if not, have fun sourcing some mid-century light fixtures for your house and send me pictures on Instagram of what you find or what you have found in the past, I would love to cheer you on.