The Modern Chandelier Trend That’s Making Everything Else Seem Dated
Glitzy metal chandeliers have ruled for years. But now fixtures crafted from plaster—earthy, subtle and sensual—are emerging as a new go-to for interior designers.
2 min
IN THE INTERIOR DESIGN WORLD, a new kind of chandelier has taken hold: fixtures whose metal components are coated in quietly arresting, matte, white plaster. The humble material—once the darling of rococo mirror frames and highly ornamental ceiling medallions—is showing up on chandeliers with few flourishes but lots of style, making a statement without being gaudy.
“I have used plaster lighting quite extensively,” said Los Angeles designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard. The pieces “add great drama and sophistication yet don’t overpower a space.” Cate Dunning also admires their subtlety, and recently installed a six-armed version by Currey & Co in a client’s dining space to give the eye a spot to rest in a pattern-filmed room that might be characterised as grandmillennial in style. Said the partner at Atlanta interior-design firm GordonDunning, “I love that plaster chandeliers introduce a new texture without adding another metallic finish.”
When creating a line of light fixtures for furnishings retailer RH’s Contemporary collection, New York designer Ryan Korban looked to the plaster creations of European sculptors Serge Roche and Alberto and Diego Giacometti, who collaborated with French decorator Jean-Michel Frank on chandeliers in the 1920s and ’30s. “Because of the simplicity in colour and material, they add a level of architecture to a ceiling and blend beautifully within any space,” Mr. Korban said of the pasty white style.
Indeed, Mr. Bullard has installed plaster chandeliers everywhere from drag queen RuPaul’s primary bedroom, which Mr. Bullard describes as “an ode to Dorothy Draper,” to American sportswear designer Tommy Hilfiger’s Palm Beach living room. “A pair of abstract 1940s chandeliers bring a freshness to the Palm Beach palette,” said Mr. Bullard, referring to the classic tropical elements of rattan chairs and potted palm trees.
New York designer Gideon Mendelson installed a pair of 1950s vintage, French, half-moon-shaped plaster fixtures in his Sagaponack, N.Y., home and relies on the style to bring “casual sophistication and texture to a space,” he said. Indeed, the dusty organic finish can help relax a formal room. Said Ms. Dunning, “It works for us specifically because it adds a more modern or ‘off’ element to a more traditional space.”
Nashville designer Sarah Bartholomew likewise toned down the stuffiness in an “architecturally intricate” wood-panelled room with Stephen Antonson’s slightly industrial Alexander model. “The white pops against the warmth of the wood walls,” she said. In a recent project, Chicago interior designer Summer Thornton hung a plaster chandelier—in which “floral blossoms” conceal the bulbs—in her client’s family room. The clean lines and chalky texture were, she said, “a welcome contrast to the velvet-adorned, traditionally shaped furniture and antique rug.”
Then there is the matter of the light they throw. Indianapolis designer Heidi Woodman goes so far as to say that plaster chandeliers cast an “ethereal” glow when illuminated. “Because plaster seems to absorb light—as opposed to metal, which bounces light—it provides a softer hue,” she explained.
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Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
Singapore’s Formula 1 weekend has always looked different. Held beneath floodlights on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, the race transforms the city into a nocturnal spectacle of speed, heat and saturated colour. It is this distinctive atmosphere — and one of Singapore’s most important natural symbols — that has shaped IWC Schaffhausen’s latest motorsport-inspired watch. …
Continue reading “IWC’s purple Formula 1 chronograph pays tribute to Singapore after dark”
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation CEO Kristina Keneally says Australia’s culture of large-scale philanthropy is becoming more sophisticated as Gold Dinner raises $75.5 million for children’s health, research and innovation.
From farm-to-table Thai to fairy-lit mango trees and Coral Sea vistas, Port Douglas has award-winning dining and plenty of tropical charm on the side.
