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A selection of Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures that were once for sale a Period Modern on McCullough, which specializes in midcentury modern furnishings.
In an undated photo, Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures hang over the Refectory (now Mabee Dining Hall) on the campus of Trinity University
In an undated photo, Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures hang over the Refectory (now Mabee Dining Hall) on the campus of Trinity University
Photos of Martha (top) and Beaumont Mood that ran in the April 11, 1965 issue of the Sunday Express and News.
Rick and Pat Kendrick stand under the Beaumont Mood Lighting globe lamp they bought from Beaumont Mood in 1978. It hangs in the foyer of their Windcrest home.
A young architect back in the 1970s, Rick Kendrick and his wife wanted some Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures for their Windcrest home.
Kendrick knew the fixtures were favorites of O’Neil Ford, often called the dean of Texas architects. Ford used the pierced ceramic or clay pendant lights and sconce shades in many of his works, including the Trinity University campus, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Dallas and plenty of residential homes he designed.
So one day in 1978 the Kendricks visited the maker Beaumont Mood in his ceramic studio on Broadway near Loop 410 and ordered four fixtures: a large globe for the front foyer and three sconce shades for the backyard patio. Mood was such a stickler for details, he sent an employee to the Kendricks’ home to look at the interior colors — which is how part of the globe is the exact same green as the long-gone shag carpeting they had at the time.
It was a prescient purchase as, through the years, Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures have become favorites of passionate collectors who appreciate the lamps’ midcentury modern aesthetic and its inherent connection to San Antonio.
A Beaumont Mood Lighting pendant sits above the desk in Rick and Pat Kendrick's home office in Windcrest.
While the Kendricks don’t remember how much they paid — “We were two working people with young children, so for sure it wasn’t too expensive,” Pat Kendrick said — pendant fixtures now are listed at upwards of $1,000 each. They finally got the fixtures and, to this day, three of the four are still in use: the large globe in the entry way and two sconce covers on the back porch. The fourth is in storage.
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While each lamp or set is unique, the basic design is consistent throughout. The spheres are mostly round, oblong or cylindrical while the sconce shades are semi-circles or three-sided. They have a wide color palettes, from bright primaries to muted pastels.
What makes them truly distinctive are the lines intricately carved into the ceramic and the dozens, even hundreds of holes pierced through them, making them attractive pieces during the day, while at night, the holes send rays of softly diffused light throughout a room or across a backyard patio.
The dining room of Marc Sauceda and Susie Hamilton’s Windcrest home is lit by a Beaumont Mood Lighting pendant.
The fixtures were designed and crafted here beginning in the early ’60s by the then-husband-and-wife team of Beaumont and Martha Mood. Today, even 60 years later, they’re so much a part of the environment, they often fade into the background, unseen.
“But once you start looking, you see them all around,” said Kathryn E. O’Rourke, associate professor of art history at Trinity University and editor of the book “O’Neil Ford on Architecture.” “They’re an important part of the historic character of the city, especially of the midcentury era.”
Their popularity, however, is generally limited, at least geographically.
Details of the pierced and carved ceramic surfaces typical of Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures
“They’re ubiquitous in San Antonio, in homes concentrated around Olmos Park and Terrell Hills, at St. Mary’s Hall and even Bill Miller restaurants,” said Ted Allen, owner of Period Modern, the midcentury modern furniture store on McCullough. “But it’s very much a regional thing. I sell at the Round Top Antiques Fair, and most people there have never heard of them.”
They’re also popular in certain pockets, such as in Dallas and Denton, but only because those are places where O’Neil Ford worked and used those lights in his projects.
Martha Mood began designing and crafting the decorative ceramic fixtures after meeting O’Neil Ford in the late ’50s.
A Beaumont Mood Lighting sconce in the backyard of Rick and Pat Kendrick's Windcrest home. The couple purchased the fixture and three others in 1978 from Beaumont Mood.
A 1962 article in “Ceramics Monthly” stated, “Ford was then at work on a number of architectural commissions for which he was unable to find suitable lighting fixtures and Mrs. Mood set out to create them for him.”
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She developed the design, the article continues, with an eye to materials used in the architecture of the time, “particularly the soft pink Mexican brick used in many San Antonio buildings … Her lamps soon became a ‘must’ in many new homes and buildings throughout the state.”
As their popularity and demand grew, her husband, known as “Bo,” took over manufacturing the lamps, according to a 1965 article in the Sunday Express and News.
“We used them on a lot of projects,” said Boone Powell, a former principal at Ford, Powell & Carson. “They’re simple, artistic and have that handmade look. With the punched holes and etched surfaces, they just seem appropriate for San Antonio.”
Making the handmade lamps was a painstaking process, requiring molds made from either lathe-turned wood or plaster and careful timing to keep the ceramic moist enough to carve but not so moist it collapsed when removed from the cast. According to the Express and News article, Mood, apparently working alone at the time, was able to complete only four fixtures per day.
A profile of Beaumont and Martha Mood ran in the April 11, 1965 edition of the Sunday Express and News.
With Mood unable to keep up with demand, the lamps soon spawned imitators. When the first Jim’s Restaurants opened in 1963, they sported overhead pierced ceramic lights, the holes forming the letter J, for “Jim’s.” But these were not Beaumonts, according Bobby Hasslocher, a member of the Hasslocher Family Partnership, which owns Jim’s, Frontier Burgers and other restaurants.
“My mom handled the ordering, but I remember picking up the lamps at a place on Sunset,” he said. “I could be wrong, but I do not believe they were made by Beaumont Mood.”
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It’s difficult to determine the value of these vintage lamps.
“It’s an insane but shallow market,” said Rob Vogt, director of Vogt Auctions. Vogt said he gets lamps in for auction only once every year or two. “It’s like trying to value the work of a new artist who doesn’t have a track record.”
Details of the pierced and carved ceramic surfaces typical of Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures
As a result, prices are all over the place. At Vogt, for example, a 28-inch-long pendant that was one of four that once hung in Stone Oak Presbyterian Church recently sold for $266. Another fixture from the same group is currently offered on Etsy for $1,550.
Retail prices are also wildly varied.
“My typical in-store price for smaller pendants is between $150 to $350; for larger ones, it’s $400 to $600,” Allen said. “But I’ve seen people online asking up to $1,500 for the large pendants and $1,000 for the smaller ones. Generally those are outside of San Antonio, and I’ve not seen evidence that they sell at those prices.”
Beaumont Mood Lighting fixtures hand outside a Bill Miller Bar-B-Q restaurant on Broadway just outside Loop 410.
It’s unknown when Beaumont Mood stopped making the lighting fixtures, but there is to this day, a company in town called Beaumont Mood Lighting. A call to the listed number revealed little about the firm, however. A woman who identified herself as Jody McCall would say only that the company is still in business, does not have a storefront and sells via “word of mouth and through past customers.”
She declined a request for an in-person interview or to have photos taken of their studio.
rmarini@express-news.net | Twitter: @RichardMarini
Richard A. Marini is a features reporter for the San Antonio Express-News where he's previously been an editor and columnist. The Association of Food Journalists once awarded him Best Food Columnist. He has freelanced for American Archaeology, Cooking Light and many other publications. Reader's Digest once sent him to Alaska for a week. He came back.