Schoolhouse Electric & Supply got its start in 2003 reproducing the undulating opal-glass
light-fixture shades that, during the Great Depression, found their way from municipal buildings—libraries, city halls, and schools (hence the Schoolhouse name)—into home kitchens and bathrooms. Founder Brian Faherty had been working in real estate in Portland, Oregon, and renovating houses on the side when he noticed that light fixtures were often an afterthought in a home remodel. The cheap, dull lighting people were buying didn't have the character or quality of the most basic fixtures from the 1930s. He went out searching for the old shades and instead uncovered a stash of antique cast-iron molds used to make them. A family-run lighting factory in upstate New York had held on to the forms well after they stopped using the 150-year-old hand-blowing method for producing glass shades. Faherty restored the molds and, with them, the shade-making process. In turn he created a home-furnishing company, part of Portland's wave of artisanal manufacturers in the early 2000s, that's now based out of a converted 1910 warehouse. In the thick of the recession, and in response to it, Faherty and his two creative partners expanded their designs from nostalgic fixtures to the Satellite 6 chandelier you see here. Where the shades recall an era that brought good design into functional spaces, the Satellite is a modern, utilitarian fixture. The exposed sockets and mirrored bulbs hanging from a solid-brass rod spun in California, all assembled and finished in Portland, do just what a piece of lighting is supposed to do: allow us to see things.
