The usual suspects - some media, some foodies, some food media - mill about one of the fall's most ballyhooed restaurant openings: the preview of AQ in SoMa at the end of October. As he circulates, first-time restaurateur Matt Semelhack is pleased, but not surprised, to hear praise for experienced chef Mark Liberman's canapes - as the bespoke cocktails go down, there are compliments for the poached oysters, pumpkin custard, duck pastrami and pork belly.

What does surprise Semelhack a little is that the No. 2 topic of conversation is the lighting: Married designers Mark and Vanessa Bell pieced together the hanging lamps from old plumbing pipes and tarnished chicken feeders. "I asked them to do something that was modern and industrial, to go with all the exposed brick, but something that also paid homage to another time," Semelhack says. "If that makes any sense."

It does, in a way - and he was asking the right task of the right people. The Bells, the proprietors of Berkeley's Omega Too Lighting Design, often take old industrial or agricultural hardware and repurpose it into one-of-a-kind lamps. And they're not alone.

Lamp designer Michael McEwen was among the earliest adopters of the found-industrial object approach in the Bay Area, and defined the hybrid aesthetic - at once practical and fantastical - that emerged: "I loved artifacts of the Machine Age; Jules Verne's futuristic Victorian contraptions; the Hoover Dam." (He also credits the Creative Salvage studio designers and steam-punk literature - two mainly British movements - with initially inspiring him; from him, the movement took local root.)

Found-object lamps have become ubiquitous in the region's restaurants. In addition to working at AQ, the Bells converted old Victrola horns into pendant lamps for Dogwood, a new bar in Oakland. "I wanted the whole place to feel approachable, with old stuff that looks like it's been here a while," owner Alexeis Filipello says, pointing at the sepia photos of old Oakland on the wall. "The aim is to make you feel at once like maybe you've been here before."

The lamps San Francisco designer Jim Misner does for restaurants often work an old-timey, pastoral vein. He contributed two converted antique milk jugs to Palo Alto's Calafia, added a chandelier of 42 illuminated old milk bottles to Big Sur's Post Ranch Inn and hung massive outmoded hay-hooks-cum-lights from the ceiling in St. Helena's Farmstead. ("They look so menacing, like torture devices," Misner says happily of the latter. "I had many sleepless nights worrying that they'd fall on some unsuspecting diners and impale them.")

Misner's lamps fit neatly into the design movement labeled rustic American or post-Victorian. If the Bells' work has a more industrial style, it speaks to a time of American triumphalism, when the nation's status as an agricultural and manufacturing powerhouse was unquestioned. "There's this longing for a lost America out there," Misner says. "And these lamps speak to that."

Residential market

The trend isn't limited to restaurants, though. Serving the residential market as well as trade customers, Big Daddy's Antiques can't keep enough stock of its repurposed lamps, including those featuring slatted olive buckets, laboratory test tubes or spent green wine bottles.

"We've given makeovers to rusty bird cages, an old rowing machine, an irrigation system cover," owner Shane Brown says. "If you stand there long enough, I might turn you into a chandelier."

If Big Daddy's offerings - and Brown's approach - sometimes veer toward the whimsical, in Berkeley, the Bells stick to a more purist aesthetic, one that is equal parts vanishing Americana and industrial-era chic. In Omega Too's showroom, there's the shiny tin wheel to which aproned waitresses once clipped orders of hash browns and over-easy eggs (converted into a pendant lamp); mason jars that once, maybe, contained stewed tomatoes hang from the ceiling with Edison bulbs in them; a silvery whirligig that formerly sat on the roof of an old house to let out the heat gives off a muted, soft light through its diagonal slats.

Mark Bell, a former advertising exec who's worked and lived all over the world with his wife, a former dancer in San Francisco Ballet, takes me into his workshop in the back, past a shelf of boxes filled with objects he intends to convert. In one of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books, there is a powder that makes inanimate objects come to life, and I imagine Bell as the wizard who will give life to some combination of these horse yokes, plumbing fixtures, wooden camera tripods, magnifying glasses and stripped car transmissions.

Safety first

Today he's going to make a rusted, industrial-bakery whisk he found at the monthly Alameda Point Antiques and Collectibles Faire into a hanging lamp. In a box of antique fixtures, he finds a long, vaguely Deco fluted tube with the same color rust on it as the whisk and uses a hack-saw to cut it to the right length.

"It's a game to use as many old parts as possible - this is Berkeley, we recycle, right?" He moves one white and one black wire - one neutral, the other "hot" - through a cylindrical casing called, evocatively, a threaded nipple, puts that inside the old fluted tube, and connects the wires to a new lightbulb socket, insulated with cardboard.

"The safety has to be there, no matter how antiquated the object. Usually that means, old shell, new guts." With some difficulty ("I wish I had smaller hands"), he moves the wired tube and socket through what he calls the whisk's "forest of wires" and into place, smiling as he holds up the rusty, imperfect finished product.

He likes to work with old music on - Etta James or Aretha Franklin - and drives an ancient pickup he found in the heartland. I'm feeling a palpable sense of nostalgia here, made almost painful when I see that formerly common stamp on a cast-iron Christmas-tree holder he intends to use as a lamp base: "Made in America," it proclaims. I remember the owner of Dogwood's words: "The aim is to make you feel like maybe you've been here before."


Big Daddy's Antiques, 1550 17th St., San Francisco; (415) 621-6800.

Jim Misner Light Designs,; (415) 706-1841.

Michael McEwen,; (510) 849-4000.

Omega Too, 2204 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley; (510) 843-3636;

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