Creating custom lighting from the ground up is a time consuming and costly process. Fortunately Old California Lantern Company offers a broad array of designs that are perfect for custom designed glass work. We often create lighting designs that feature a motif found elsewhere in the home. My favorite fixture of theirs is the Cobblestone Lane lantern; interior or exterior, available in 4 sizes and offered in various finishes and mounting options, the proportions of this design are very pleasing.

We just sent this new Birch design off to a home in Michigan:

This one has an English Arts & Crafts influence:

My Climbing Rose design on a table lamp:

We made this custom panel for a dining room in Greenwich, Connecticut with the architect Nancy Lovas. She came up with a novel solution for how to access the lights above; she put the steel reinforced panel on a mechanical lowering system typically used for chandeliers. I think she did a fine job illuminating this room with the combination of hidden up-lighting and obscured down lighting so there is no glare from direct bulbs.

Elements of this design were influenced by the leaded glass of Purcell & Elmslie. One feature consistent in most of their designs is the use of thin lines of glass punctuated with squares of more saturated color to frame the central motif. While their domestic designs bear the influence of Elmslie’s years as Louis Sullivan’s chief draftsman and designer, their designs for their midwestern banks had the most influence on this project. I was certainly thinking of their work and their color combinations as I made these drawings, even though my approach wasn’t as linear as theirs.

From the Madison State Bank of Madison, Minnesota, 1913:

When you go see the Daniel Clowes exhibition at the Oakland Museum, be sure to see my leaded glass window on view not far from the Diebenkorns, Langes, Arnesons and McMillans.

Don’t ask anyone where it is even though it’s installed as part of the Permanent Collection. I was able to smuggle in a camera in case you can’t make it.

A couple of years ago Tedd Colt of Caledonia Studios was commissioned to create a suite of furniture for the Arts & Crafts study area. The museum requested insets of materials such as hammered copper and stained glass for the kids table, so Tedd asked me to come up with something suitable (lead-free) and I made this panel and another one nearby. Although the museum administrators refuse to meet with me or acknowledge my contribution in English, I am pleased that the kids whose parents park them there appreciate my contribution to deepening the understanding of the importance leaded glass plays in the world of Decorative Art. I just wish they’d stop drooling all over it and coloring it in with their crayons.

Here’s a detail from a window we made for a home in Georgia. The glass in the tree, background and flowers was made in Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Indiana. The bird is made out of blown glass remnants made by Evan Chambers in Pasadena, California.

I met Evan 7 years ago at the Pasadena Craftsman Weekend and made a trip to visit him in his workshop the following year. His place was in the middle of nowhere back then and he seemed to spent all his time experimenting and making his highly original work. He showed me how he made his intricately feathered and iridized glass the way he was taught by the late Sonny Cresswell, a process that I never understood.

When I was leaving he gave me a gift I didn’t know what to do with; a box of broken glass vessels. A few years later I designed a window inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and came across Evan’s scraps when I was looking for glass for the bird. I realized if I reheated them in the kiln, they’d slump flat and I could use them in a window.

A few years later I went back with my son, and Evan took the time to give him a glass blowing lesson!

Here’s what he made:

At the turn of the 20th century, leaded glass windows in common homes was typical; however, these weren’t the architect designed windows that were widely published at the time, but designs chosen from catalogs that were printed by the various glass manufacturers of the day. Several years ago, on a trip to Chicago to photograph the work of George Washington Maher, I came across a catalog window in Maher’s E. W. Hedrick House of 1914 in Kenilworth, Illinois. What’s odd is that the house is filled with original leaded glass designed by Maher’s firm (or by the firm who made the windows – more on that later!). Why did they decide to go with something unrelated for these interior doors? My guess is that either the doors were added later or they simply loved this design. I’ve included the original illustration from my 1909 National Ornamental Glass Manufacturers Catalog.

Just saw this on Prairiemod, a Darwin Martin House Window is being auctioned and the auction house has made a high resolution image of the windows available. Take a look here and click on the ‘look closer’ icon.

Looking closely at Wright’s most famous glass design there is a lot to see: the variation in the colors that gives the window so much character, its handmade quality as seen in the solder joints and the geometric imperfections. One gains an appreciation for the time it takes to build a window as intricate as this, where each piece of glass and metal is cut to fit perfectly with it’s neighbor.

Here are detail images of the work shown in Bruce Smith’s book from my previous post. Shot with available light, these capture how the windows look under everyday conditions. See more images from this project here.

Music room windows:

Living room windows:

Master bedroom door backlit:

I was pleased to see our work in Bruce Smith’s new book Greene & Greene: Developing A California Architecture  on page 49. It shows the interior of the Darling House in Claremont, California.

See more images from this project here.

This project started out as a commission for our Japanese Maple door set, a design we’ve produced a few times over the years.  As I often do, I sketched to come up with a different approach, something that would incorporate more of the tree as I did in a recent commission for a client in Minnesota.

About 5 drawings in, I had something worth presenting. The client liked it and made a request – to delete the downward flowing branches to reflect the way he prunes the Japanese Maples in front of his home on Whidbey Island, Washington.

Here’s what we made: