We recently bought an 8 year old house that has a large, hexagonal great room in it. Hanging from the middle of the peaked ceiling is a 36" wide pendant light. All wiring is done behind exposed beams so it would probably be difficult to add new runs unless we used wiremold.

The room measures about 34 feet across, from the center of one wall to the center of the opposite wall. The ceiling is about 16 feet tall in the center and 9 feet tall where it meets the walls.

The room is dark and needs good lighting. This pendant light there now provides pretty good lighting, but not great. We also think the room would benefit from a ceiling fan, to blow warm air down in the winter and to move stuffy air around in the summer (home is not air conditioned and has radiant floor heat).

Concerning the darkness of the room - there are two sets of windows and one very large (four panels) of sliding glass door on the three sides that face more or less south. One set of windows on an opposite wall. There are no skylights installed. I think in the winter there will be more sunlight into the room, but since we moved in we always need to have some interior lights on because it's just too dark without them, even when it's very sunny outside.

For reasons unclear to us the glass dome on the pendant light broke in half- one day when we left for work it was in one piece, and when we came home it was in two semi-circular pieces. The model of light fixture has been discontinued and so we will probably need to replace the whole thing anyway because replacement glass isn't available (as far as we can tell so far).

As a replacement to the ceiling light we could put a ceiling fan with lights but I doubt that would give us enough lighting that we really need.

I'm picturing possibly a ceiling fan that is wired for lighting, but instead of attaching the light to the fan we could run several (three or six) smaller pendants away from the fan, to lower parts of the ceiling. If we bought a remote controlled fan we could turn on the lights by a wall switch and turn on the fan using the remote.

Can anyone critique this idea or give me other ideas that might work better? We already have some floor and table lamps which we are OK with using, but I'd prefer not to have to rely on them most of the time- good ceiling lighting would be the preferred way of doing this.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.