After you get what Coastal French design is, you can set about making the change happen in your home like we did in our makeover. Finding a Coastal French dining room light fixture is as simple as a Google search, but if you aren’t finding the one, you can broaden your hunt to solely Coastal or solely French lighting. When you look at either category’s offerings, you want to look for elements of the other. The exception being if your dining room is already Frenchy and frilly, then you’re trying to temper it with a shot of Coastal. Then go all in on a Coastal chandelier. Or vice versa.

Coastal Chandelier Examples

Coastal lighting has simple clean lines, often embellished with ever-practical rope. There’s no room for frivolousness at sea! Crisp white, weathered white, driftwood, rattan, shells, iron and brass are other standard elements of the look:

French Chandelier Examples

French is ornate. French is gold. Chandelier isn’t a French word for nothing! (Though, it means candelabra to them — not sure how that one got lost in translation)!

Coastal French Chandeliers

To get a Coastal French dining room light fixture, you let a LITTLE bit of the French frill onto the coastal scene. It ranges toward a tad more disciplined than most French Country light fixtures. With Coastal French, an unnecessary curve or two goes a long way:

Look how the white triangular one, when seen from the bottom, mimics the rose window at Notre Dame in Paris:

Yet, in profile, it’s SIMPLE — something you could picture hanging over a table in the ship captain’s quarters.

Skating Pond’s Coastal French Chandelier Choice

For our dining room, there was already a lot of frilliness going on, so we chose this tamped-down empire chandelier made of wine barrel staves.

It screamed ‘PICK ME’ in ten different colors, many of which would have worked. In the end, white won to contrast with the wooden table.

It also works against the backdrop of the china cabinet we found. More on that another time … be sure not to miss any posts by subscribing at the bottom of the page!