Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Stained Glass Design

One of the things that I love best about old houses is that they often come with neat stained glass windows.  Our house had sadly been stripped of anything cool like that when we bought it, but we were pretty sure that our front door at one time had stained glass.  A few years after we moved into our house, the hubby surprised me by contacting a local stained glass artist to make a custom window for us.  That artist is the talented and very sweet Pat Vloebergh. If you are in the Atlanta area and looking for stained glass, beveled glass, etc. I highly recommend you check out her website and give her a call.  I promise she will design something gorgeous just for you.  So the hubby told her all about me (how I love Autumn and Halloween) and Pat worked up several designs. This is the one I chose:

This pic does not do it justice, the colors are brighter and more vibrant in real life.

I went with the autumnal tree/owl/spiderweb design because I felt like it spoke to Fall/Halloween without being too over the top.  I have loved that window every day since we had it installed and have always hoped that maybe someday we could incorporate more stained glass into our house.

When we were first sitting down to design the renovation, I spent a lot of time online looking at pictures of old houses. When I came across this picture of a bathroom in the beautiful King-Keith Bed and Breakfast in Inman Park, I knew I wanted to do the same thing in our master bath:

I've never stayed at the King-Keith, cause you know, I live here, but it's got some pretty high ratings online so you might want to check it out if you're ever in Atlanta.

After much thought and deliberation, we decided to go ahead and splurge and have Pat design some beautiful windows for our master bath as well as a transom that will be at the end of the hallway.

We met with Pat and got to choose from several different designs:

  On the left is several different choices for the two master bath windows, and on the right is several different designs for the transoms.

We decided in for a penny, in for a pound, so we are going to go for the two most elaborate of the designs for the master bath:




Remember that most of our bathroom will be white subway tile, so these windows will provide a much needed pop of color in the room.   This is our top three choices for the transom:



The H is for Howard of course, but I thought it was just a little too egotistical.  The owl is very cute and matches the front door, but we ultimately decided to go for the cobweb.  It also matched the front door and spoke to my love of Halloween...and it would be very unique.  Sometimes I wonder if, many years from now, people will think an arachnologist owned this house because of all of the stained glass spider webs.

So here is what we are thinking of for the colors:


That large beautiful piece of striated blue and white glass will be the sky background on the master bath windows.  The little orange, brown, green and yellow samples underneath it will be the different colors of the falling leaves on the tree.  The yellow round piece of glass on the paper is what we've decided to go with in the cabochons of the transom design.  And this opaque brown will be the tree bark:

Just holding it up to the light to confirm it's opaque so no one will see my naked wet tushie in the shower.

We decided to add a little color around the spider's web in the transom, so we are going with the same striated green glass that frames the owl/tree on our front door (it's the large chunk in this picture):

We know that this is definitely one aspect of our design that we will never see a return on when we sell the house, but we don't care.  This beautiful stained glass will make our house special and unique, and we will love it every single day that we get to live here.  Sometimes, you gotta live a little, ya know?

7 comments:

  1. It's going to be so beautiful when completed! Love the designs you chose.

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    1. Thanks! I can't wait to see it finally installed, probably 6-8 weeks from now.

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  2. So jealous! This will look fantastic! Tabitha and I have toyed with the idea of installing a stained-glass window one of these days. When we redo our bathroom (many, many moons from now), we'll definitely hit you two up for your artist!

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    1. Absolutely! Pat is wonderful and she can custom make something that perfectly fits your style (stained glass TARDIS anyone?).

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  3. My father use to do a lot of stained glass art. Some can still be found around his and other family members houses. The process takes a lot of skill to do well but when its done it is truly one of a kind.

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    1. Wow that is awesome! You totally need to take some pictures of the art so I can see it!

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  4. Wonderful stained glass designs. They are looking really outrageous
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