CYNTHIA Zahar’s chandeliers exude the “wow factor.” They are utterly fabulous and make one think of the “Thousand and One Nights” look, glowing with exoticism and fantasy. Zahar is part of a growing number of creative interior designers who are making recycling fashionable. When she graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, she started off by turning into original furniture whatever she found in dustbins. “At the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the Lebanese threw away loads of objects and furniture as if they wanted to get rid of anything which might remind them of that period.” She began to make chandeliers when she not only realized that most chandeliers hanging in Lebanese homes, looked alike with their bronze frames and dangling crystals but also that contemporary designer lighting was still extremely expensive:
“Searching for a new identity in post-war Lebanon, it seemed logical for me to reinvent the objects used by former generations which no longer expressed my own sense of aesthetics and comprehension,” she says as she enjoys challenging conventional ideas of beauty.
Each chandelier is a one-off piece based on a theme depending on its frame or the space it has been commissioned for. Moreover, all the chandeliers designed by Cynthia are personalized: Each one is given a name. She has named some of the pieces after a person the chandelier reminds her of, such as the famous Egyptian belly dancer, Tahiya Carioca, Elizabeth Taylor or even her clients’ names since they are often the source of inspiration.
These “artrageous” chandeliers are made with old and new crystals, glass beads, vintage or new plexiglass cuttings, feathers, cutlery, earrings and necklaces, metallic or plastic flowers and anything Cynthia finds in flea markets. She uses lots of transparent elements, especially crystals so that the chandelier sparkles with light. Glass not only transmits light but it also reflects and absorbs it. Cynthia acknowledges that she always makes sure that half of the materials she uses to make a new chandelier have a translucent quality. She handles all these materials as though they were precious and the creative way in which she uses them gives her work a unique, attractive and sensational look.
