The garden flat, showing 3 of the 4 doors and the front door at night.
When a friend moved to a flat in Bath she gave me the choice of any window for a commission. There are so many good places for stained glass here, including three sets of french doors and also internal windows between the extension and the original Georgian building. I chose the front door sidelight (a new word for me) because it doesn’t open and it seemed useful to define which was the front door, which you can see in the night time photo (above right).
Choosing and then cutting the glass pieces. Painted landscape piece on the left and chopped up on the right.
The friend had already chosen a piece of painted glass, a landscape, from my offcuts pile, maybe she was thinking that I would make her a window of that size. I put it next to some other types of glass in the right colour range for her interior, a textured pale peach, a dense green and a pink swirl (above left). I decided to cut a column of each to make a stripy window that would fit the sidelight.
I couldn’t remember where the landscape piece of glass had come from, just that it was part of a commission for a private house in Bournemouth that I made in 2001. I found photos of some of these panels in my studio window before they were made into double glazed units (below). I’ve no idea when some of them broke - maybe during transit, but certainly not during toughening which makes the glass shatter, as I’ve been using large pieces of the original panels in other windows ever since.
Photos of a commission from 2001 which was the origin of the landscape painting.
Top and bottom sections of the finished window.
I cut the landscape piece straight so I could use all of it, but introduced a gentle curve on the dark green glass on the right. Next to that is a thin line of patchwork pieces in harmonious colours before the pale peach that I sandblasted at the bottom where you don’t need to have light coming in. The stained glass sits in front of two wide wooden window bars, hiding them when its dark outside and the lights are on inside. There is some tweaking to do on the installation, but the window fitted and the colours and details looked completely at home.
Front door with sidelight and detail.