A chalkboard greeting welcomes visitors to the Schoolhouse Electric factory.What sort of work were you doing before Schoolhouse Electric? Faherty: I was a real estate broker selling old homes on the east side of Portland in the early 1990s, when people started to restore homes. Those folks were looking for materials that matched the quality and ethos of the past, and there weren't many options for lighting, which I had a real passion for. So I started to do research around what had happened to all of the amazing fixtures and the companies that had produced them. I was particularly smitten with institutional-style lighting that you'd see in public buildings and storefronts, like schools and shops. I liked how practical and beautiful the opal glass shades were, yet they had all — except for a handful of ubiquitous shapes — disappeared.