The Secret of My Dining Room Lights
My dining room (or kitchen, as it were) is a convertible space. That’s because the office I added is in the basement, and, in the spirit of wellness, I decided that it was unhealthy to work in a room with no windows. It was healthier to work in a room with French doors that faced my mostly verdant yard. Healthier, still, to work in a room that housed a mostly green orange tree that’s sometimes laden with oranges. Last year, the tree barely hung on through a punishing winter. My husband jury-rigged grow lights with clamps to the molding so that we had to suffer the indignities of cords and clamps and lights all winter long, but the tree made it. And so did we.
When we renovated our house, the dining room (we’ll call it that, for now) had raspberry pink walls and a lime green ceiling, and a brushed-nickel light fixture that hung so low I nearly hit my head on it when I walked into the empty room. I hated everything about it, but somehow I saw its potential, mostly because of those four panels of glass that faced the yard, and the corners, where I envisioned a tree thriving one day. We painted the walls a pale gray, the ceiling white. I found that sunburst chandelier on a vintage website, and now it hangs right above the table that my mother finally agreed to part with, the same one that I ate every dinner of my childhood life at, the one that became the kitchen table, the dining table, my desk.
I tried a fiddle-leaf fig in the corner first, and, predictably, it died. Then, one day, my husband came home with an orange tree, but he warned me against falling in love with it because oranges don’t like the abusive cold of New York winters. After that first year, it was nearly bare when April arrived, its leaves all shed, its blossoms sticking to the hardwood below. This year, it has nine heavy green oranges the size of golf balls, and a full mane of leaves. It pulled through. No, wait: It flourished.
What was different? This year, so that I could maintain peace in my office-slash-dining-room-slash-kitchen-slash-toddler-battlefield, he hid four grow lights in the cans in our vaulted ceiling, above the sunburst Mid-Mod light fixture that hangs over my dining table (slash-kitchen-table-slash-desk). And these lights, which run all day long, and all night long too, are actually the new favorite thing about my makeshift office, because they allow that orange tree to just not die. It’s a weird design feature in my weird multipurpose house.
I thought, when my husband first put them in, that I would find the blinding yellow lights as punishing as the winter that almost killed that lovely tree. But actually, the light is a little bit sweet on the bruise-purple mornings, when everyone is still asleep, and it is just me, and the tree, and the loud clang of the too-expensive espresso maker, and the clack of the emails I have to get to before the one-year-old and three-year-old need peanut butter sandwiches and eggs, and before everything is sticky and loud. Did you know you could love something ugly that makes something else a little more beautiful? I didn’t. But it’s true.
As for the room—once a pink and green nightmare, then once an artful place to eat—it is now a convivial garden: an orange grove, my forest of ideas, a place to gather for food and thought and, yes, the errant toy car, wheels still running beneath my feet.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
