Blue Pendant Lights

Blue is the colour most changed by the bulb behind it. A warm 2700K lamp pulls navy and teal towards green and softens the edge of the glass; a neutral bulb keeps the blue reading true and a little cooler. Worth deciding before you buy, because the bulb is the cheapest part of a fixture to change your mind about — which colour temperature to run sets out the difference.

Colour is easier to live with in small doses. One blue pendant over a side table or a hall console does more than a row of them; over an island, keep the rest of the scheme quiet and let the glass be the only loud thing. For heights and diameters, see how high to hang pendants over an island and the pendant size guide. If you want the shape without the colour, compare the wider glass pendant range — and green pendants are the nearest neighbour if blue is close but not quite it.

Open the colour selector before you fall for a photograph. Every pendant here comes in several colourways with blue as one of them, and blue covers a wide spread: navy and deep night blue at one end, sky, water and light blue at the other. Where the colour sits matters as much as the shade. On the bubble-glass, gradient-glass, opaline and rippled glass-ball designs the blue is in the glass itself, so the light comes out tinted and whatever sits underneath takes on a cool cast. On the metal and wood designs the blue is only on the outside: the fixture is the coloured object and the light below stays the colour of the bulb. For blue pendant lighting over a kitchen island or a dining table, that second group is often the easier choice, since tinted light over food is not to everyone's taste.

After a blue chandelier rather than a pendant? A couple of the glass and acrylic chandeliers outside this grid come in blue, among them the Camisa glass chandelier, in a 50 or 60 cm diameter, and the Sienna acrylic bird chandelier, a round four- or five-head fixture. And if blue turns out too cool for the room, pink pendant lamps do the same job in a warmer key.