Custom Solutions by Karen Herold

Partner, 555 International, Chicago
555.com

The best thing about owning our own shop is that we get to build whatever we feel works best for the restaurant (and have a good reason not to sit behind a desk all day)!

Embeya, Chicago
This is technically not a light fixture. It is a sculpture designed to reflect the light from above. We handmade this piece by creating leaves out of resin and embedding them in metal wire. We draped them over an acrylic rod to create an eight-foot-wide ‘curtain’over the two ‘kings’tables. I love how it is so large yet feels so fragile.

GT Fish & Oyster, Chicago
I wanted to create a chandelier that reflects the ropes at a dock after a storm. We started with perfect knots tied to a metal ring and added these gorgeous light fixtures by Tom Dixon. We then started deconstructing it into this planned mess.

Hard Rock Café, Tampa
For Hard Rock we create many ‘music centric’elements. Here, we created these six-foot diameter chandeliers out of speaker cones that hang on a steel frame. The reflective light bulbs add a little sexy to this industrial look and added a great ceiling feature to the café.

Girl & the Goat, Chicago
We created many custom items for this restaurant. The light fixtures over the bar were a simple assembly of copper pipe and mason jars that were left over from a basement renovation; the backbar consists of old fireplaces that I found at an antique store. We sandblasted them and added lights, which created nice vignettes for the bottles.