How High to Hang a PH Pendant Over a Dining Table

A PH pendant is calculated light, and the calculation only pays off at the right height above a table. Hang it too high and the pool of light thins out across the room; hang it too low and the shade sits in front of the face of whoever is opposite you. This guide sets out the working heights, shade widths and spacings for the four Louis Poulsen pendants most often hung over a dining table.

Start 60–70 cm above the tabletop

The figure to remember is the gap between the tabletop and the underside of the shade: 60–70 cm. Louis Poulsen gives that range for the PH 5 Pendant Lamp, and it is a sound starting point for the family as a whole. At that height the light falls on plates, glasses and hands rather than on the tops of heads, and the tabletop becomes the brightest surface in the room.

Two of the pendants ask for slightly different numbers. The all metal PH 4/3 Pendant sends its light cleanly downward from white painted inner shades and works at 50–60 cm above a dining table, kitchen counter or wide desk. The PH 3/2 Pendant, with its mouth-blown opal glass shades, settles at around 60 cm over a two-person table. Treat these as first positions rather than final ones: hang the pendant temporarily, sit down at the table, and look across it before you fix the height.

Match the shade width to the table

Shade diameter is the second decision, and it is easier than it looks because the PH pendants are named and sized around it. A shade that spans roughly a third of the table width reads as deliberate; much narrower and a single pendant leaves the ends of the table in shadow, much wider and it starts to crowd the setting. The PH 5 is named after its 50 cm main shade, which is why it suits a full four to six seat table, while the 30 cm PH 5 Mini Pendant Lamp is scaled for two-to-four-seat tables and kitchen counters.

Note the fixture heights in that middle column, because they are part of the arithmetic people forget. The PH 5 occupies 267 mm of vertical space on its own, the PH 3/2 occupies 242 mm, and every centimetre of shade is a centimetre the cord does not have to cover. Weight matters too when you are deciding what the ceiling rose is fixed into: 4.6 kg for the PH 5, 3.1–3.2 kg for the PH 3/2, 2.5 kg for the PH 4/3 and 1.9 kg for the aluminium PH 5 Mini.

Keep the shade below the eye line

The reason the 60–70 cm range works has less to do with the tabletop than with sightlines. Poul Henningsen built the three-shade system in 1926 so that the light source is hidden behind layered shades and the eye never meets it directly. That protection is geometric: it holds when you look at the outside of the shade, and it weakens as soon as your eye rises high enough to look up into it.

So the practical test is done sitting down, not standing up. Take the chair furthest from the pendant, look across at the person opposite, and check two things. You should see the outside of the shade rather than the inside, and you should be able to hold a conversation without leaning around it. If the underside of the shade cuts across a face, raise it; if you can see up into the shade from a seated position, lower it. The range exists precisely because tables, chairs and the people who use them vary.

Hanging two or three in a row

Long tables and kitchen islands often want more than one pendant, and the spacing follows from the shade diameter rather than from any fixed number of centimetres. Three habits keep a row looking composed:

• Leave at least one shade diameter of air between neighbouring shades, so two PH 5 pendants sit around a metre apart from centre to centre and two PH 5 Mini pendants around 60 cm apart.
• Centre the group on the table, not on the room, and keep the outer pendants in from the table ends by roughly half a shade width so the row does not overhang the last place setting.
• Hang every shade in the row at the same height, measured from the tabletop rather than from the ceiling, since ceilings are rarely as level as they look.

Scale down as you multiply. A pair of PH 5 Mini pendants over an island gives two even pools of light where one PH 5 would give a single larger one; three PH 3/2 pendants along a narrow table stay visually light because the opal glass shades are only 285 mm across. If you want the row to disappear into the room rather than announce itself, the white lacquered PH 4/3 is the quietest of the four.

What a 3 m cord will reach

All four pendants come with a 3 m fabric cord and a canopy, which is generous for ordinary rooms and worth checking in tall ones. A dining table stands roughly 75 cm high, so a shade hung 65 cm above it has its underside about 1.4 m from the floor. Under a standard flat ceiling the cord drop is a little over a metre once the height of the fixture itself is subtracted, and most of the 3 m stays coiled in the canopy.

The maths only tightens in rooms with a loft conversion, an old apartment ceiling or a double-height space. Measure from your ceiling point down to the intended top of the shade, add nothing for slack, and compare that with 3 m less the fixture height: 267 mm for the PH 5, 242 mm for the PH 3/2, 200 mm for the PH 4/3, 163 mm for the PH 5 Mini. A ceiling at about 4 m is close to the limit for a PH 5 over a dining table, and anything higher calls for a different suspension solution rather than a stretched cord. Sloping ceilings need the same check taken at the lowest point of the fitting, because the drop you need is measured vertically, not along the slope.

Get these three numbers right, the height above the table, the shade width against the table width, and the cord drop, and a PH pendant will light a table the way it was calculated to. If you want the reasoning behind the shades themselves, read how the PH three shade system works, or see the rest of the pendant lamp collection to compare shapes and sizes side by side.