Founded in and under the same ownership since 1996, Meteor Lights designs and fabricates whipstitched and hand-painted fiberglass drum lampshades, mid-century modern light fixtures, and retro pendant lamps, bringing classic ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s Americana lighting design to your home or business. Our hand-stained drum and tiered lampshades also look great with streamline moderne, tiki, vintage western, googie/biomorphic, and Danish Modern styles, as well as with midcentury/modern-influenced contemporary lighting design.
Our colorful lamps, fiberglass lampshades, and pendant light fixtures suit a wide range of residential and commercial lighting, from ’40s and ’50s Eames-era Americana to contemporary and modern styles influenced by classic post-war industrial design. We make our shades and pendant lamps by hand, “the old-fashioned modern way.” Our colors and patterns are hand-applied, not printed digitally, so each shade is a unique work of art, and will be a compelling feature of your home or establishment for decades.
Meteor Lights’ pendant light fixtures, lamps, and lampshades are found in five-star restaurants and dive bars, coffee houses and rock clubs, new architectural showcase homes and renovated rockabilly pads, hair salons, bowling alleys, and retail establishments of all kinds. Vintage dealers and retro shops specify our replacement tiered and drum reproduction shades for their vintage lamps.
We offer a large selection of midcentury-modern lampshade styles, retro and contemporary colors, and 1950s vintage designs – providing a ridiculously wide range of lighting possibilities.
vintage shade parchment style
Our translucent Lumicel fiberglass-alternative lampshade parchment provides a glowing illumination similar to the fiberglass parchment used on original mid-century lampshades, but without all the health and environmental drawbacks. Lumicel is also great for shoji screens, room dividers, lighting panels, and many other light diffusion applications.
Lumicel is durable, water-resistant (unlike linen or paper), and cleans easily with a damp cloth. Lumicel is made from recycled water bottles (PET), and the fibers are supple, not brittle, so it doesn’t have the scratchiness and airborne fiber issues associated with fiberglass lampshade parchment.
We hand-stain our lampshades to achieve a wide range of vintage, retro, modern, and contemporary colors, and we can match your colors (with a fabric swatch, paint chip, or Pantone number). We take pride in fabricating the coolest, highest-quality, and widest variety of replacement drum and tiered shades anywhere..
authentic replica lampshades
We also fabricate custom drum lampshades, such as the Majestic Z-Lamp tambourine shade with the classic zig-zag design, and the Danish Modern floor lamp inverted tall cone shade.
We specialize in the low-profile shallow drum lampshades and tiered shades characteristic of mid-century/modern lighting of the 1940s and 1950s. Within certain parameters, the height of our drum shades can be customized to fit most lamps; for example, we also make the large barrel lampshade style characteristic of many lamps from the 1960s.
pendant lamps & light fixtures
In addition to our replacement fiberglass lampshades, we incorporate our shade material into our custom-made swag lamps (hanging lamps),custom pendant light fixtures, and fiberglass sconce shields (perfect for your vintage Airstream Trailer). Our UL Listed modern pendant lamps are suitable for many indoor commercial and residential applications.
Located in the Mission District of San Francisco since 1996, Meteor Lights provides cool custom lamps, vintage-retro and contemporary lampshades, and modern light fixtures to the Bay Area, Northern California, the West, and beyond.
Can’t wait 4-8 weeks for your custom order? You might find your lighting solution in our in-stock ready-to-ship lampshade section of the on-line store (updated 11/19/24). These are production over-runs, samples, orphaned prototypes, experiments, and one-offs from original vintage lighting materials we’ve stumbled upon over the years. These shades and lamps go at a discount, and are available to ship within 48 hours. If there’s nothing listed, check back later!
Advice for choosing lampshades and pendant light fixtures can be found on our Lighting Tips page, where you can read our tips on selecting the right size and style shade and pendant lamp or light fixture, as well as some suggestions on choosing colors and patterns.
…And we’re glad to answer any of your lighting-related questions by phone or email..