VINTAGE LIGHTS & PERIOD LIGHTING 

Lighting was, of course, upgraded in old houses as years went by, so you don’t have to stick to the earliest period of your house.

For those who want to buy traditional lighting fixtures that date to a certain period, we have subdivided the lighting category by time period. But that’s only one of the ways we could have organized the lighting category. (Within each era, for example, we list sconces or wall brackets, floor and table lamps, and chandeliers.) Need a little help deciding where to begin looking? Read this explanation of our lighting sub-categories to find the perfect period lighting:

Colonial Lighting: styles from before 1820, even if available electrified, including patinated copper lanterns; chandeliers with “tapers”; onion lamps; mirrored sconces

Gaslight Era Lighting: Victorian period lighting, usually electrified in reproduction. Includes designs adapted from fixtures that would have burned gas (shades open up rather than down); gasoliers; Victorian sconces; fancy fittings and shades

Arts and Crafts Lighting: stylish lighting of the period 1890 to 1925, with allusions from English medieval to Asian-inspired Californian. This is “bungalow lighting”; Cotswold style; art glass and mica shades; hammered copper; Mission sconces

Electric Era Lighting: designs from after the dawning age of electricity, Colonial Revival through Art Deco and Sputnik. Includes bowl ceiling fixtures; schoolhouse lights; urban fixtures; traditional and industrial designs

Lighting Accessories: a grab-bag that includes Edison-style lightbulbs; pushbutton switches; Art Nouveau wall plates; art-glass shades

If you look for them, the inspirations for today’s lighting fixtures are obvious. We see the Middle Ages and Gothic period in the hand-hammered work of Arts and Crafts lamps, for example, or Elizabethan times in a wrought-iron Tudor chandelier from a 1920s Hollywood home. Contemporary inspiration can produce authentic lighting, too, as in Machine Age and Sputnik-era fixtures. It’s no wonder reproduction lighting is so exuberant and widely available.

Since the perfection of the incandescent filament barely a century ago, lighting manufacturers have made a bonanza of period inspiration, drawing design ideas from as far back as ancient Egypt. Twentieth-century lighting is an especially rich design field, because the new technology made it easy to adapt styles both recent and ancient for the progressive Modern reality. The gaslight shade, for example, no longer needed to be made of flame-resistant glass or turned upright in order toprovide safe illumination. Shades could now be open, enclosed, face-up or -down, appear solo or in multiples. Fabric shades—beaded, bowed, or fringed—could safely be placed in close proximity to the incandescent bulb.

The best period lighting comes in beautiful packages. Electricity is the gift that made it all possible, from near-perfect replications of hand-turned, wire-armed colonial chandeliers to the 1950s fixture that hovers over the hallway like a flying saucer.