By Michael Good | SDUN Columnist

Lighting is among the more evocative aspects of one’s home: It imparts style, reveals one’s taste and finances and provides a warmth and glow that people are instinctually drawn to.

Vintage lighting fixtures also add a note of old-world charm—if they’re in good shape. But if your antique chandelier’s missing, or more dim than dazzling, you can easily replace it.

Buying antique lighting can be fun. The workmanship and the inventiveness of the designs, which incorporate a plethora of themes and motifs—spiders and webs, flowers and fruit, Greek keys and Egyptian
symbols—are delightful in their own right. And there’s an element of the treasure hunt involved in buying antique lighting. As with antiques, manufacturers can be well known or obscure. Prices can range from the affordable (say $200 for a wall bracket) to the ridiculous—$20,000 for fixtures from Stickley or Tiffany.

There are at least three approaches to restoring your home’s lighting. You can go completely authentic, by first establishing the style of your house—Spanish Revival or Arts and Crafts, Colonial Revival or Tudor. Then you do the research and do the shopping. Plan B would be to pick a style you like (that’s available and affordable) and stick with it. This works if you’re not sure about the style of your house, or if you have a 1920s Revival, because houses of that era sometimes mixed styles. For example, Spanish-style houses often had art deco fixtures. (And art deco is more widely available than Spanish-style fixtures, and more affordable.) Plan C is to throw caution to the wind and install whatever lighting catches your fancy, although this approach usually only works for design professionals, or on reality TV.

Antique lighting, particularly when it’s in good shape, has become increasingly rare and expensive. San Diego, which was a small town in 1915, never had much of it to start with. That great source of antique lighting for the last few decades, the Midwest, has also been pretty much picked clean. Still, a few local shops continue to stock vintage lighting. Tap Lighting, in Hillcrest (3690 Sixth Ave. (619) 692-0065), has a good supply of art deco lighting. Gibson & Gibson (gibsonandgibsonantiquelighting.com) is mostly known for restoration work (it repaired lights for the White House), but it also sells restored fixtures (the advantage here is that they will be in near-perfect shape). Architectural Salvage (2401 Kettner Blvd., (619) 696-1313) is on the other end of the spectrum; what you’ll find there usually needs work.

In Los Angeles, Pasadena Architectural Salvage has a bigger selection. Its website (pasadenaarchitecturalsalvage.com) is also an excellent place to compare prices and learn about architectural styles. Revival Antiques, also in Pasadena, has higher-end lighting, in restored condition. Its site (revivalantiques.com) also provides a good overview of styles and prices. Online, Rejuvenation rejuvenation.com) sells reconditioned lights and lamps. You’ll also find light bulbs for vintage lamps, which are hard to find at the grocery store. Online auction sites, like Ebay offer a wide selection, although condition is always hard to assess—inevitably, the one side of the fixture that doesn’t appear in the five photographs will be the side with the scratch on it.

Finally, reproduction lighting from Rejuvenation is worth considering. You can be sure that the lights work, are in great shape, and use energy-efficient bulbs. The Rejuvenation catalogue also provides an education on lighting styles, and the people who create it (and provide service over the phone) have a real passion for restoration, lighting and the high-quality stuff they make.

In days gone by, a light fixture used five bulbs to illuminate a library table. Today that doesn’t make sense. Nor does the cotton-wrapped copper wire (prone to breaking down and creating fires) that we once relied on. But with a little research and a spirit of restoration we can marry old-world ambience with modern efficiency and economy and add a nostalgic note to our homes’ lighting.