Brass, Drum Shades, and Mirror Balls: A Modern Lighting Design for La Rochelle in Bar Harbor
La Rochelle sits on the edge of Bar Harbor with the kind of grounds that set a high bar for anything built within them. For Kelsey and Pat’s June reception, the design called for something that could hold its own against that setting – modern, considered, and built to carry the room from a sun-drenched afternoon into a full dance floor by nightfall.
Working alongside RL Sisson Events and the floral team at Afterglow Floral, the lighting design centered on three distinct fixture choices, each serving a different purpose within the clear top tent.
Cream Drum Shades Along the Dining Expanse
A clear top tent offers open sky and natural light – and almost nothing else in terms of overhead texture. Without intervention, the ceiling reads as structure rather than atmosphere. Oversized cream drum shades hung along the tent’s central line gave the space its anchor, diffusing warm light over the long tables below and softening what could have otherwise felt like a very transparent box. The fabric shade is doing two things at once: adding tactile warmth to the ceiling and pulling the eye down toward the tables rather than up toward the framework above.
Brass Dome Pendants Over the Bar
Within an open layout, lighting is one of the most effective tools for defining where guests are meant to gather. A row of sleek brass dome pendants suspended directly over the powder blue bar made that zone immediately legible — the warm metallic finish caught the ambient light and drew the room’s attention without requiring signage or architectural walls to do the same job. A clean architectural element that signaled to guests exactly where to gather for a signature cocktail, the pendants sat well alongside the bar’s own design, giving the space a coherent point of view rather than a collection of separate decisions.
Mirror Balls Over the Dance Floor
A cluster of mirror balls at varying scales hung beneath the clear roof above the black and white checkered dance floor — a choice that worked in two entirely different registers depending on the time of day. In the afternoon sun, they caught and scattered natural light across the tent and the lawn beyond. By the time Hudson Horns and June Events took over, the same installation was fracturing stage light across a packed floor. The fixture didn’t change. The night just asked something different of it.
Designing a reception like this one is always a collective effort. The fixtures earned their place because the rest of the room — Afterglow Floral’s arrangements, the bar build, the tablescapes — was pulling in the same direction. When every element has a clear point of view, the lighting has something to work with.
