Most chandelier commissions are for one room. The Peak Antler commission for Seven Lakes Lodge was for three. Norman Design Group’s brief covered four custom antler chandeliers: two matched pieces for the great room, one for the dining room, and one for the breakfast nook. The lodge sits in the White River Valley of northwest Colorado, the retreat of pro golfer Greg Norman and his wife Kirsten Norman, who heads Norman Design Group and ran the remodel.
By the time Veranda photographed the work, the four pieces had been designed in conversation with Kirsten, built in parallel at the Peak Antler studio in Woodland Park, and installed alongside the broader remodel.
Each Room Asked for Something Different
The brief arrived as a designer’s package: photos of each room, floor plans, ceiling lines, finish notes, and a clear point of view on the visual register Kirsten was building toward. Kirsten, who has worked on hotel interiors at the Fairmont Nile City in Cairo and the Park Hyatt Zurich, was running the full remodel. The lodge had previously been a corporate retreat, built of logs sourced and trucked in from Montana.
Greg’s brief to her for the remodel had been short: lighten the dark interior.
That direction shaped the chandeliers. They needed to read as sculpture that belonged in mountain architecture, anchor the rooms they were going into, and hold their own against the scale of the logs and the stone.
Each room carried its own scale and its own job. The great room sits at the center of the lodge, anchored by a two-story stone fireplace and a wall of picture windows running its length. Meals happen in the dining room, at a long table beneath a timber-beamed ceiling. Off the kitchen, the breakfast nook handles smaller, more intimate use. Four chandeliers from three series in the Peak Antler chandelier collection had to provide focal lighting across the set.
The Antler Chandeliers, Designed Room by Room
The great room asked the hardest question of the commission: how to light a room of this scale without putting a single fixture at its center. Even at the largest variant, a single chandelier would not have given the volume enough light, and the long axis of the room called for symmetry. Two matched Mt. Elbert antler chandeliers became the answer, each built to six feet across and six feet tall with 24 lights apiece. The composition of a great room chandelier at this scale blends elk and mule deer antler. Elk delivers the structural sweeps that pull the form into its rounded shape; mule deer fills the interior with the finer tine structure that keeps the silhouette from reading as solid mass.
The dining room presented a different problem. A long table beneath a timber-beamed ceiling needed a chandelier that tracked the length of the table rather than centering on it. The Snowmass antler chandelier took the form of the room: six feet long, built entirely from mule deer antler, suspended from a timber beam that Peak Antler sourced and finished. The beam reads as part of the composition, a horizontal element that grounds the oval form of the chandelier and ties the fixture back to the timbered architecture overhead. The mount also lowers the chandelier closer to the table than a ceiling-rod hang would, so the form of the piece follows the table line the way a long pendant would.
In the breakfast nook, the answer was the opposite of the great room’s. After the volume of the Mt. Elberts and the length of the Snowmass, the smallest space in the project needed a chandelier that read at close range. The Sunshine Peak antler chandelier, just over three feet across in a teardrop silhouette of mule deer antler, hangs lower and reads quieter. It functions less as architecture than as the fixture you sit beneath.
Four Antler Chandeliers Built in Parallel
Building four lodge chandeliers for a single project is a different proposition from building four chandeliers over the course of a year. The four pieces have to be in the studio together. They get sourced as a set rather than one at a time, designed against each other so the four-piece set reads as one coherent lighting plan, and finished on a coordinated timeline that lines up with the rooms reaching readiness. With a matched pair in the set, that coordination becomes structural to the work itself.
The twin Mt. Elbert antler chandeliers in the great room made that requirement explicit. A matched pair is one design problem with two outputs. The elk antlers that carry the structural sweeps were selected for both chandeliers at the same time: for every antler that defined a sweep on the first piece, a mirror antler had to come out of the same lot for the second. The mule deer antler that fills the interior was matched the same way, tine for tine. Across the build, the two chandeliers sat in the studio together. Antlers fitted into one piece were checked against their counterparts in the other before either composition was locked. When the pair hangs in the great room, the symmetry is built in at the antler level, not approximated in the install.
The electrical build runs identically across the four pieces. All lighting is constructed using UL-approved components, tested for polarity, and subjected to a 1000-volt overload test. Wiring is concealed within the antlers, routed through channels drilled into the material, and terminated where nothing is visible from the room below. From the rooms, the chandeliers read as material and light.
The install logistics ran on the remodel’s schedule rather than the studio’s. The four pieces were crated to their individual dimensions and shipped to the lodge in northwest Colorado, each piece routed for its room. Installation happened in step with the rooms reaching readiness, with the matched Mt. Elbert antler chandeliers mounted at the same time so the pair would settle uniformly into their canopies, and the Snowmass and Sunshine Peak antler chandeliers following on the broader project’s schedule. By the time the chandeliers were in place, the rooms around them were finished.
Inside the Three Rooms
In the great room, the two Mt. Elbert antler chandeliers read against the log walls, the two-story stone fireplace, and the picture-window wall that runs along the room. The matched silhouettes echo each other across the long axis, holding visual weight against the timbered ceiling and the stone. The room takes in a lot of light through the picture windows by day, and the antler softens in tone as the day moves toward dusk. When the candles come up, the light travels up the antler and across the timbers, and the silhouette of each piece settles into the room as evening does.
The Snowmass antler chandelier works the way it was designed to in the dining room. The antler form follows the table line, the timber beam carries the fixture closer to the table than a ceiling-mount could, and the mule deer reads at the scale a dining space asks for rather than the scale a great hall would.
In the breakfast nook, the Sunshine Peak antler chandelier does the same job at a quieter range, the antler arranged close enough to read in detail from beneath rather than from across a room.
Peak Antler has been building custom antler chandeliers and antler light fixtures for nearly 30 years, much of that work at lodge and mountain-home scale. Seven Lakes Lodge is the kind of multi-room custom commission a designer brings in when scale and material need to be right from the first conversation. The chandeliers will hang in those rooms for decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a multi-piece commission like Seven Lakes Lodge take?
Roughly 8 to 12 weeks, depending on the size and number of fixtures in the commission. Larger pieces and larger sets sit toward the longer end of that range.
Can Peak Antler match pieces across a single commission?
Yes, with the understanding that no two antlers are alike. Every fixture Peak Antler builds is unique in and of itself. What the studio matches is the design: silhouette, proportion, species mix, finish, and scale. A meticulous approach to pairing antlers across both pieces is what makes a matched set read as one.
Will the chandelier specifications work with my project’s electrical and structural plans?
Peak Antler provides the specs, weights, and mounting hardware for every chandelier in a commission. The structural and electrical fit to a specific home is a decision for your contractor or electrician, who evaluates those documents against the project plans.
For projects at similar scope, the work begins with the room. See how a Peak Antler commission unfolds.