 relatively low level. About a metre above the table is usually a good guide to run by. Doing this, the dining table becomes the unmistakable gathering point.
The proportions of your table and your dining space will dictate the size of the fixtures you use. Be sure to balance these. A long rectangular or oval dining table can work brilliantly with a linear arrangement of three pendants, placed to give a wash of light over the table’s surface. While a small round dining table will best work with a single pendant or chandelier. Ultimately in comes down to your style, but make sure to measure first, get your proportions right before making the big purchase.
Open plan spaces are currently the way to go for living areas. Combining kitchens, dining and living rooms in one airy large space. This can pose a challenge when you want to create an intimate dining space that leaves everything else behind. The choice of lighting in this situation becomes an added tool to mark off or zone areas. In the case of a dining area pendants dropped to a low level over a table immediately mark this space off as something different to the rest of the room. Even during the day, they will help focus the eye on the table. Separating this eating zone from the rest of the room.
In this era of Bluetooth, Casambi and personal controls there’s no reason not to set light at exactly the levels you want. During the day the table can be a hub of activity for working from home, an early dinner with kids and everything in between. But when you need something a little more intimate and atmospheric having the right dimmer controls will give you the opportunity to change the space in the flick of a switch (literally… plus everyone looks great in a low light).
A dining space is somewhere we gather for special events as well as the day to day. It is a hub of activity and some of the best memories you will create. Christmas dinners, birthday parties and catching up with you closest. It deserves something a bit special. So take a bit of time to find something that suits your style and ticks all the boxes for a memorable occasion.
Often a pendant over a table is not quite enough to light the whole room for comfort. So think about how you layer the rest of the light around the space. Whether it’s wall lights, table or floor lamps position them where they won’t intrude on everyone around the table. Watch out for any glare from them that might catch the eye of one of your diners and pull their attention away from the table. And lastly make sure you have control of them, dim them up and down. Play with them at different levels to get your lighting just right.
Take a look at our full range of pendants from designer brands. Perfect for creating the ideal dining experience.
As always we’re here to help with any questions you might have on lighting a dining space. Feel free to get in touch with us at [email protected] or on 00353 (0)56 776 4308.
Well-traveled former Maryland quarterback Danny O'Brien has his foot in the door with the Atlanta Falcons.
O'Brien is among a list of 24 players invited to attend the Falcons' rookie minicamp on a tryout basis, the team announced.
O'Brien, who transferred from Wisconsin for his junior season after two seasons at Maryland that included being named the 2010 Atlantic Coast Conference Rookie of the Year, finished his career at Division II Catawba last season.
He completed 68 percent of his throws for 2,490 yards and 15 touchdowns with six interceptions at Catawba.
O'Brien left Wisconsin after playing in seven games, completing 52 of 86 passes for 523 yards, three touchdowns and one interception.
At Maryland, O'Brien passed for 2,438 yards and 22 touchdowns as a freshman.
As a sophomore for the Terps, he started seven games and passed for 1,648 yards and seven touchdowns before leaving the program.For real. I became obsessed with trying to achieve the perfectly poreless, wrinkle free look these girls all have.  The funny thing too is they still look just as beautiful unedited. It's so crazy how much social media messes with your head and makes you try to achieve these unrealistic ideals. I'm 33, I had bad acne from the age of 14 to 26, I tanned, I smoked. I don't know where the hell I got the idea that I could achieve their look but seeing them day in and day out just made me feel inadequate. This sub really changed my perspective in a huge way.The political parties created in Romania after 1989 have lost the battle with time and history.
The Romanian social, economic and – last but not least – political actuality poignantly points to a grave, chronic and irreconcilable deficit of all the political doctrines and ideologies born or reborn immediately after 1989, the ones that created the whole range of parties, from the left wing to the right wing of the political spectrum, forming what has so far been the framework of our new democracy.
After more than four decades of communist dictatorship, suddenly open before the Romanians’ eyes were not only the borders of the country but also the freedom to be and do what previous generations did not hope would ever happen again. But especially an apparently incredible and huge range of political options, seen before only in certain history books and heard from the stories of those who had experienced those “other times” before the dark age of dictatorship.
In the first years after the fall of communism, the “political market” was oversaturated, almost overnight, by a veritable plethora of new political parties, never before seen or heard of. Some of them with doctrines, pretensions, and an antiquated historical perfume – the National Liberal Party, National Peasant Party, Conservative Party –, and others (most of them in fact) located somewhere at the confluence between the old historical political tradition, the ghostly inertia of the communist era that had just come to an end, and the new democratic national and European outlook.
In just a few years, a forceful political exercise was imposed on Romanians for the decades that followed. And one of the most difficult stages of this exercise consisted of the formation and legitimisation of individual social options in relation to the ideological and doctrinaire currents of the political parties that had formed.
Thus, the years that have passed since 1989 have been marked by several large stages of political orientation, migration, coagulation, and dispersal of society toward various political currents and implicitly political parties that held – in turn – power and supremacy at the top of the Romanians’ electoral options.
Still, as a defining element of all these great stages of the sifting and erosion of the whole Romanian post-communist political and party system, there was and still is an incontestable lack of any doctrinaire and ideological reality that would have been actually followed and observed by any of the parties that have alternated at the helm of power.
The only algorithm that worked in any of the occasions in which there was national-level competition between the various political parties that alternated in power was and still is the algorithm of intra- and inter-party groups of interests. An element that, invariably, has had the same end goal and result: taking over and maintaining power. This is the only way to explain all the political alliances, mergers and unions that have occurred within the Romanian political party system in the last 28 years, and which can be translated as being – in most part – “against nature” from the standpoint of any doctrinaire and ideological definition and of delimiting them in relation to the “left” or the “right” on the political axis.
However, the opening of state and mental borders toward a new world in which the old global political paradigms have underwent a continuous transformation in recent years has meant that Romanian society, in its own turn, absorbed, digested, and separated at an incredible speed the old from the new, the truth from the untruth, and the arbitrary from the concrete. After 28 years of political illusions and disillusions, Romanians have reached that critical mass that requires an urgent restart and radical renewal of what has so far been called political party and political system in Romania.
Against the backdrop of a strong European current with obvious orientation toward a new type of democratic political paradigm, in which mainstream parties (those political parties based on classic doctrines, such as the Liberal, Christian-Democratic, Social-Democratic or Popular ones) have increasingly lost ground in the face of the wave of new political forces and factions, such as the “anti-establishment” parties (entities that are based on ideological and doctrinaire nuclei of a radical-reformist and ultra-conservative type), Romanian society is somehow indirectly forced to rethink and reorient its domestic political vision and options.
Since 2015, a trend of radicalisation of political visions and almost zero tolerance on the part of civil society toward everything that no longer corresponds – consciously or less consciously, individually and socially – to the people’s present needs has started to take ever clearer shape in Romania.
In recent years, deficient parties and Governments have been censured via extremely low voter turnout. People no longer feel represented by any of the current political parties that have remained active and eligible.
Thus, the instruments and props that a party has used until now to capture the interest of the electorate and gain their endorsement have become insufficient. And the vote for or against the political system has gone beyond the ballot box stage and has moved into the street.
The largest protest since 1989, which took place in 2015, has started a new social awakening. This has brought with it a great revival in national individual consciousness. With the tragic event at Colectiv, Romanians brutally became aware of the complete cul-de-sac and