The Tiffany Chandelier

My sister is going to college in one month and she insists I help her decide on how to decorate her room. We are ten years apart, so naturally we are going to differ on what makes a room feel like home. We decided to start with the basics, her bed. She wanted to bring her black spray painted four posted bed with her black accent lamps . My first thought was, she is going to scare her roommate to death with her artistic Gothic style. Then my second thought was -she can’t bring her bed, she has to sleep in a little twin bed like everyone else, but she could decorate around her bed. So I suggested she start with something else, like lighting, because she could bring her black accent lamp.

There was the storage closet, where our mom kept all of the things she had gathered from other grandparents or stuff she collected to give to us girls when we were ready to move out. We decided to dig into it.

"How about this Tiffany chandelier?" I asked her joking around. It was a huge and sparkling piece with beautiful stained green, brown and red glass in the shapes of butterflies and tall grass. "That’s totally old school." She said. I realized we did have different tastes for sure, and secretly I was glad because at the end of the day there wouldn’t be an argument over the Tiffany chandelier and I would take it home. Where did this lamp come from? I was curious to find out. It sure looked old, but it had a beauty that doesn’t fade easily.

My grandmother from Oregon was visiting a couple weeks later and I asked her about the lamp. Did I ever open a can of worms! That Tiffany chandeliers was given to my grandmother as a wedding gift from her father, a traveling magician. He wasn’t very good at magic, she told me, but he liked to pretend. He wasn’t very good at holding down jobs either and traveled a lot.
One of his odd jobs was sorting through donations from the Salvation Army. "Oh, I said, he found the Tiffany chandelier in the donations!" My grandmother laughed and said that is a good guess but that’s not where he got it. She said he met a beautiful woman who was working for the Salvation Army, price tagging items, her future mother, his future wife. She was going on a trip, driving down the California coast and asked him if he would like to join her. He said yes, and they had an amazing adventure, making a little bit of money with his bad magic tricks and other odd jobs, while exploring the California beaches.

"Okay," I said, "so when did he get this Tiffany Chandelier?"
It turns out, my great grandfather and grandmother were given this Tiffany chandelier as a gift for working an odd job, painting a new hotel lobby. During one of the couple days they worked, the hotel manager lost all of his money in an overnight poker match, including the hotel. He paid the couple for their time with the Tiffany chandeliers that hung in the hotel lobby. When my great grandmother past away, the Tiffany chandelier was my great grandfather’s most prized possession, reminding him of the time he and my great grandmother fell in love.
I was shocked. This truly was an art piece with more than just a hotel lobby history. A family heirloom! Now I was really glad my sister wouldn’t be taking it to college! Instead my sister did take her black accent lamps and her jet black duvet cover for her twin bed. Her roommate was even more Goth then her! They shared black curtains and went in together on a black carpet, happily dark together.

About the author: Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about Tiffany chandeliers or accent lamps go to Lighting Design