Think your low-ceilinged apartment or bungalow just wasn’t meant to have dramatic lighting? Think again. Thanks to a new crop of long, linear chandeliers, it’s easy to pack a big style punch over your dining table or kitchen island—without the long vertical drop.

ochre light drizzle chandelier
Ochre’s Light Drizzle Chandelier Rectangular, in a dining room designed by Amy Aidinis Hirsch Interior Design. Photo by Mixit, courtesy of Ochre

A few of our current favorites come from Ochre, the London- and New York City-based luxury lighting brand (available in Denver at Town Studio) led by business partners and designers Harriet Maxwell Macdonald, Joanna Bibby, and Solenne de la Fouchardiere. We caught up with Macdonald to find out why Ochre is giving the linear chandelier a starring role in its latest lighting collections.

What inspired your team to design lighting fixtures that lack the traditional vertical drop?
We were inspired by landscape-oriented lighting fixtures that span the width of a room. People living in small spaces in big cities don’t always have the space for large vertical-dropped chandeliers. Landscape-oriented lighting fixtures are an ideal solution for rooms with low ceilings.

Oche gaia pendant double tiered
Ochre’s Gaia Pendant Double Tier comprises four LED-illuminated solid-glass pebbles with blackened-nickel caps and a matching counterweight and canopy. Photo courtesy of Ochre

Where in a home does this style of fixture work best?
Landscape-oriented lighting fixtures are beautiful over a dining room table, kitchen island, or in a living room.

Ochre’s Gaia fixtures are such simple yet impactful takes on this trend. What’s their story?
Our landscape-oriented lighting designs incorporate age-old crafts like gilding, lacquering, metal-casting, and glass-blowing—all with a beautiful contemporary sensibility. Our Gaia and Double Gaia pendants [which range in width from 52 to 56 inches] were inspired by artist Alexander Calder’s sculptural mobiles. These pendants employ elegant engineering to balance an LED-illuminated solid-glass drop with a blackened-nickel cap—and we just designed a new version that features two hanging fixtures.

Other Ochre designs we love: the Arctic Pear Chandelier Oval, a cluster of clear, solid-glass drops with a statement-making 55-inch width (don’t miss the even wider Wave version); the raindrop-inspired, 40-inch-wide Light Drizzle Chandelier Rectangular; and the Medusa Bloom Oval, a canopy (as wide as 78 inches and comprising as many as 26 mouth-blown glass drops) inspired by a group, or “bloom,” of jellyfish. See the entire collection at ochre.net.