Sandra achieved this look by removing the walls separating the old dining space, den, and family rooms, thereby opening views throughout the house and to the outside. She also had the low, 7’6″ ceilings removed to expose beams and enable the installation of skylights.

I must admit, I love how our Insulator Pendants look so light and delicate in this space. They add subtle texture and sparkle without detracting from the simplicity and architectural merit of the room. Something else might have looked busy.

Notice the ball jar pendant in the pantry. Clever.

For the full story and more pictures, go to the New Old House website.

Source.

Or should we say, Jonathan, inventor, mad scientist, painter, gardener, musician, craftsman, and otherwise jack of all trades? After 20 years at Conant Metal and Light, Jonathan is invaluable for his encyclopedic knowledge of lamp parts and past projects, and for his genius of a mechanical mind. On any given day, you can find him quietly working in the back of our shop under the constant breeze of a fan. Ask him to solve a tricky mechnical problem and he’ll say “sure, that’s easy.” But then, that’s only the tip of Jonathan’s iceberg. To get a fuller picture, let’s take a tour of his house, aka “The Museum.”

The house, largely concealed from the road by a thicket of plants, is a relic of the twenties. And stepping inside, it almost feels like a step back to that era. Electrified antique gas lanterns spread pools of soft light around tables in an otherwise shadowy living room. Under each one is a sort of exibit. Of what? You squint your eyes to see a series of models: miniature ships that Jonathan built or restored, toy trains, weapons, functional and sculptural, experiments in electricity. Jonanthan has a passion for understanding the way things work, their physics, their systems. As a kid, we ask questions like, “Dad, how do microwaves work? and “Is time travel possible?” Apparently, Jonathan never stopped asking. 

 

His entire attic is full of model trains. And in his basement…a toy baseball game that he constructed over a period of 20 years. A series of minitature stadium lights illuminate the field, business cards advertise along the walls.

Come take a tour of our workshop at 270 Pine Street. You just may see him there.

We recently salvaged and reinvented a piece of furniture and it’s story seems like the perfect metaphor for Vermonters. With the flooding in June, Lake Champlain’s waters rose to unprecedented levels. When the waters receded, Tyler, a memeber of our staff, came upon an old barge hatch that had washed ashore. He walked the hulking piece of metal (weighing around 125 pounds and almost as large as he is) up the hill, down the sidewalk, and into our doors on Pine Street. Around the same time, we discovered a wheeled factory cart that, judging by its scarified surface, had probably been used to haul steel or bricks. Both pieces had most likely been dumped into the lake for filler a hundred or so years ago and forgotten.

Scraps of history, souvenirs of the flood…but what to do with them?

Make something new, of course.

Tyler at work.

As it is with people, time, hard work, and rough weather can make for some beautiful character.

And patina. 

This job called for eye candy – clearly ball jars, insulators or cast off industrial machinery just wouldn’t do. In this case we stuck with repurposed materials and set to work disguising their origin. The leaves were individually cut from small pieces of scrap copper left from a roofing job…

The stem is a used piece of 1″ copper tubing rescued from a job site dumpster and the ampersand was cut from bronze scrap pulled from the CM&L scrap barrel…

Clearly, repurposed metalwork can take many forms!

Thanks Church & Main, we wish you the best in your new endeavor!

Here’s a blurb from the article:

“It’s so like a Vermonter to come up with this: take a quintessential symbol of the farmhouse kitchen, turn it on its head, and let it shine.  Conant Metal & Light of Burlington, Vermont, salvages thick-glassed, antique canning jars, the ones Granny used for putting food by and turns them into energy-efficient lights.”

Here’s a quick story from our latest:

From Burlington to Vegas…

While restaurant lighting is nothing new for us, a restaurant in Las Vegas is. Seed Design of NYC, requested a proposal for pendants. We transformed their conceptual sketch in 68 hanging jewels.

Custom spun aluminum tops and bottoms gave hand-blown ruby glass globes the contemporary Asian look desired. Our UL certified production capacity assured performance and safety. What fun!

After our Ball Jar campaign this past summer we were left with over 1,000 canning jars to play with.

Pictured is our one-of-a-kind Spyder Chandelier featuring 5 ball jars hung at various lengths from a vintage brass base.

Do you have an idea for your own custom fixture? If you can imagine it, Conant can make your idea come to life!

Steve Conant looks positively radiant in his award sash!

2010 marks our 4th year in a row to win the coveted Seven Daysie Award!

We look forward to serving you for many more years to come, thanks!

Using LED bulbs in the insulator and flashlight pendants, allows you to not only reuse artifacts, but use less electricity at the same time. These bad boys often run off of only 1W of energy!

                   Copper, Steel, and Brass, $395

            Pine Bough Menorah, Brass, $295

    Restored Candelabra menorah, Brass, $250

Nancy Badami and Jonathan Ward of Conant Metal & Light, heeded the call on Thursday, December 10th to make a series of  menorahs for the begining of Hanukkah. Badami, who works in the retail showroom at Conant worked up a few sketches and asked for the expert help of Ward, one of our skilled metalsmiths. Together they came up with three amazing pieces in one day, just in time to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah.