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mary791

Mixing brass and nickel light fixtures. Different floors okay?

Mary
4 years ago

Hello, all. I need your opinions on mixing and matching lighting fixtures throughout our home.


My husband and I bought a townhouse 2 years ago that was built in the early 2000s. The floor plan is reminiscent of a brownstone. You enter our house and there is a short stairway to our office downstairs and another stairway up to our open living room/kitchen/dining room on the main level. There are 2 additional bedrooms on the top floor. When we bought the house, all of the fixtures (door handles, lights, faucets, ceiling fans) were brushed nickel and are builder grade in feel and look.


We renovated our kitchen last summer and we went for more of an updated midcentury look: wood tone cabinets on the lowers, white upper cabinets, marble-y white quartz counters. Our appliances are all stainless steel. We chose brushed brass hardware for the kitchen faucet, the cabinetry, and two pendants that hang over our peninsula. In the fall, we purchased a brass crystal chandelier for our dining room.


On the upper floor, we added a ceiling fan that is a wood tone with brushed nickel and we've swapped out some of the basic "boob" lamp flush mount lights in the closets for inexpensive but modern-looking flush mounts, also in brushed nickel.


My husband REALLY loves the brushed brass look, and while I do, too ( in certain instances), generally I have more reservations about how it can be incorporated throughout our home. It would not be worth the investment to change all of the light fixtures in our house to brushed brass, especially when they don't all need to be changed (though most do). This is our first home, but it's not our forever home.


Right now, we only have brushed brass light fixtures and hardware on our main living level. We plan to change the chandelier in our front entryway (which is open to our dining room with the brass and crystal chandelier), as well as the track lighting in our living room and a basic flush-mount pendant on the main level stair landing. In both of these instances, we're probably going to install brushed brass fixtures--especially in the entryway, since that chandelier will hang just 10 ft visually from our dining room chandelier.


My question is: if we choose a brass chandelier/pendant for our entryway, and brass lighting for our living room, will it look strange that the upper and lower levels in our home have brush nickel fixtures? Personally, it's not the sort of thing that would bother me during the day to day routine, but I worry about selling our home in the next 5 years and having potential buyers finding our home to be a mish-mash of metals. I welcome your feedback and can attach pictures if that would help. Thank you!

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