How And Where To Hang Your Pendant Lighting At Home
There are thousands of choices when it comes to selecting pendants for your home - and distilling the right one for you can be a real challenge! That's one of the reasons we created our Mint Folk Directory for our clients - so they can easily find a huge variety of options in one place, made by skilled craftspeople and built to be both stunning - and safe!
We talk a lot at MINT about making choices for your home that are driven by your own emotional reactions. We bring the light - you choose the look - and together, we craft the perfect light for your home. But how do you choose? And even more importantly - how do you hang them for the best results?
So many images and TV shows, show decorative lighting hanging right up close to the ceiling. At MINT, we say NO to that. Think of decorative lighting as jewellery for your home. You should love it - you'll be looking at it every day. Pendant lighting (and all other decorative lighting for that matter) should make you smile, bring the sparkle to your home and be the perfect accessory for your interior decoration and design.
Hanging Pendants the RIGHT way
Pendants over dining tables should sit about 600mm off the top of the table - we're talking 1500mm off the floor - or at the MOST 1800mm off the floor. At this height, they are part of the picture of the room, and the create a cosy atmosphere at the table. By hanging your lights at this level, they become part of the story of your home.
When you hang them too high, they are no longer a feature. They become disconnected from the room, and you miss out on the impact of a light creating a sense of human scale, and warmth in your home.
Worried about the light being too much of a visual block? Then choose something that is open in it's design. Something you can see through. Like branches of a tree, you can see that it's there, and you can still see past it to what is beyond.
OR with LED lighting, you can find pendants that are dramatic, and super thin - which means you can see past them regardless of height, and they can still create the lovely pool of light over your table that transforms your dining area from cafeteria to high end restaurant.
Over the kitchen bench, the same heights apply. The lights are supposed to connect your bench to the rest of the room, provide useful light if possible and emphasise the zone of the kitchen from the rest of your open plan living space.
The only location that requires a different approach is hallways. We need to keep in mind tall people and save them from that horrible moment when they walk into a room and get knocked in the face with light. Your pendants here should be in line with the top of your door frames. That's the lowest section of the pendant, not the top. If you want to see a dramatic effect, or have a large hall that needs a big element to bring it in, then choose something that spreads. A light that has size and scale in the horizontal plane, not the vertical. In most modern homes with ceilings at 2.4M or even 2.7M, the ceiling is usually too low for a pendant in this location, but if you have ceilings of 3M or above, then you can really choose anything you like.
In recent years, we've seen more and more pendants alongside beds - and notoriously over baths. We've written about baths before - head over here to read more - and pendants for the bedside can look fantastic. These need to be hung super low - at the same sort of height a table lamp would reach above your bedside table, around 1000mm to 1200mm above the floor.
So, now that you know how to hang them - how do you choose them???? Beyond feeling joy every time you look at it, a pendant should also add beautiful light to your room. You can select pendants that only shine light up into the ceiling for drama and height, pendants that shine light in all directions to fill a smaller room with light, and pendants that focus all the light down - either from a large shape or a narrow one - and those are what you want wherever that light needs to be doing a little more than just looking pretty.
