Have you ever been in a room that just seemed to glow with beautiful pools of light, illuminating small, gorgeous details, and making everyone in it instantly look beautiful and feel warm and at home?
If the answer is yes, chances are an interior designer was at work, who knew how to design custom luxury lampshades, with the perfect interior linings, the topic of today’s post.
In the USA, many companies can design custom luxury lampshades, but one stands out above all others, Illume in New York City. Chances are if you’re a designer reading this, you know of them and have heard of famed New York designer Celerie Kemble’s patronage of this wonderful resource.
This is an Illume custom lampshade in one of Celerie’s rooms, shown below.
If you’re not a designer, but a regular reader of ours, what follows are visuals showing you how to identify the parts of a table lamp and then some general *how to measure for a lampshade* guidelines, and then, more beautiful lampshade examples from Illume, to set your imagination alight!
First, what are the parts to a table lamp? This graphic will help you know what to ask for, if you’re replacing or having an antique luxury lampshade reworked, something Illume does frequently.
This graphic shows you some additional parts to a table lamp, including the all important finial, one of the wonderful details of design. All of these parts can be customized by your interior designer, if you want a one of a kind lamp that noone else will ever have, as you will see in the beautiful examples below.
And here is a lamp shade with its parts named.
To read an excellent and very detailed article with more pictures explaining lamp parts and measurements, {including the term, “fitters” and why this matters, please come back and click here.
To read an excellent and very detailed article [ with pictures ] on how to buy a fine quality lampshade, please come back and click here.
Fine quality shades contain many couture sewing details, as you might imagine.
One example is vertical seams, which hide the interior vertical ribs when a shade is lit.
The shade on the left doesn’t have vertical seams, so the wire shows through when the lamp is lit.
Below is a beautiful custom lampshade from Illume NY, covered in Fortuny and trimmed with gold, before we continue with general height and size guidelines for lampshades.
[ And if you love Fortuny, come back and click on this post Leslie Hendrix Wood wrote about her love of Fortuny fabrics and their history. Pure eye candy, too! ]
Ready for some guidelines on how to measure for the correct table or floor lampshade size? Our thanks to THIS site, for the below information.
LAMPSHADE HEIGHT - MEASUREMENT GUIDELINES:
The height of a table lamp shade should be approximately the height of the base (to bottom of socket) x 65% up to 80%. The height of a floor lamp shade should be approximately the height of the base x 47%. Measure shade height along the slant.
On ILLUME’s site, they give this rule of thumb:
THE LOWER THE LEVEL OF THE TABLE LAMP, THE HIGHER YOU WANT THE SHADE TO SIT, THE HIGHER THE LAMP IS DISPLAYED, THE LOWER YOU WANT THE SHADE TO SIT.
DIAMETER/WIDTH OF A LAMPSHADE - MEASUREMENT GUIDELINES
The diameter (width) of a table shade should not exceed the height of the base (to the bottom of the socket) and should be within 2″ of this dimension. Floor lamp shades should clear the widest part of the bulb by at least 3.5″ on each side of the bulb (unless using compact fluorescent bulb).
Lampshade size is usually expressed in terms of its diameter (16″ shade has a diameter of 16″).
Here are some different lampshade styles, and their names, courtesy of this graphic on Illume NY’s website.
Now that you know a little more about *How To Measure For A Luxury Lampshade* and the details of *How To Identify Lamp Parts*, let’s go back to the eye candy for more inspiration!
Seriously, how beautiful is this?
If you love the finest in luxury hand craftsmanship in lampshades, then you’ve found your workroom in Illume.
We could see many Texas women loving this glamourous bedroom, part of Tommy Hilfiger’s 75 million dollar penthouse on the 18th and 19th floors of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, currently for sale, shown below with custom Illume lampshades for the table lamps.
Lastly, we close with this stunning, hand painted and lacquered red tole shade with its beautiful customized interior fitter in bronze, also by ILLUME.
We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s post and will consider sharing it, to help ILLUME NYC continue to thrive as a one of a kind artisinal resource manufacturing the finest in luxury lampshades for years to come.
And, as always, thank you for reading Hadley Court. We appreciate you.
~~~
Leslie Carothers
for
Leslie Hendrix Wood
Founder, Editor in Chief
Hadley Court
Interior Designer
Leslie Hendrix Wood Interiors
Midland, Texas
~~~
Gracious Living. Timeless Design. Family Traditions.
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Here at Hadley Court, we simply love showcasing and sharing quality, luxury craftsmanship and helping keep artisanal traditions alive.