"Only in the north are rooms disposed so as to seize the midwinter light. In their different ways, the Scottish castle room, with the boards and beams of its ceiling richly painted with ochre and red, and the Scandinavian manor house, with its grey panelling and white ceilings, are designed to work in the light that is thrown upwards by snow. At midwinter, the double function of the prisms of chandeliers (or of the rustling groves of glass leaves and faceted spheres of the chandeliers of Scandinavia) is to cast fragments of rainbows about the room from the low sun or from refracted sunlight. An icy consolation, a diminished and domestic echo of the aurora borealis."
From The Idea of North by Peter Davidson.
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