NUMBER 41

I returned to see a set of windows I designed and made last year for a house in Stockwell, London, no 41. I wrote about all of these windows while I was making them in previous blogs, so this post is about how they work in the space. It’s an early Victorian four storey double fronted house that the architect owner has completely refurbished - I’ll have to go back again to take a shot of the front elevation when the light is right (I mean when I remember to turn it on behind the fanlight).

Front door and fanlight above: double glazed front door panels. The initials (& the shoes) belong to family members.

At the front there is a stained glass fanlight using colours that run through the house - ochre, gold, silver, red, pink and pale green, all of them in warm shades. Lined up with the yellow foliage blobs on the fanlight are two rows of trees on a pair of double glazed panels in the door below. I used both inside surfaces of the glass in the double glazed units to paint and sandblast on, creating the depth you can see in the detail below. The glass provides the right amount of privacy up close and also lets a lot of light in.

Front door and reflection: detail through the two layers of glass.

The back of the house: back door from the inside.

The back door faces south to a large unshaded garden. The techniques I used, again sandblasting and enamelling on the two inside surfaces of the double glazed units, show up really well from the outside and also very dramatically in sunshine. These are midsummer photos, in winter the colour travels further along the adjacent walls and the two different oranges in the glass are intensified on the yellow ochre background. I left a lot of clear glass for visibility in to the garden, you see this window down a short flight of stairs as soon as you come in the front door of the house.

Details of double glazed panels in the back door.

Second floor bathroom from the outside (lights on): from the inside.

The bathroom glass was the first I made for the house, the design was an enlargement of the colour samples I make with every colour agonised over until we got the right mix (and then they do unexpected things in the kiln). In the master bedroom it’s mainly yellow (above), upstairs serving the children’s bedrooms (below), there are more colours and a bigger difference when the lights are on and off. These colours are hand painted on etched glass so there is no chance of seeing through the glass in these lovely, functional sliding doors.

Top floor bathroom from the outside (lights off): from the inside.

Silver stain

Silver stain is a paint made from silver nitrate that turns some glass yellow when fired. It has been used for glass painting since the fourteenth century and it gave stained glass its name. I’ve written about my love of silver stained windows previously on my blog here. In my own work I usually use enamel when I want a transparent yellow, but below are two examples which show the great advantage of silver stain which is that you can put it on the back of the glass (you can’t do this with enamel as it sticks to whatever you lay the glass on in the kiln) and get a layered look.

Hillside from 1983 and Kelmscott Manor from 2014.

I haven’t bought any silver stain for years, but I have eight pots of it - all differently labelled - that I have acquired from various places over the years. I made a small panel out of my colour samples (below left) which included a strip of silverstain painted on the back and front of the glass - see how the metallic elements on the tin side of float glass change the pale yellow to amber. I also made some larger sheets to cut up (below right), failing to match the colours and textures that I achieved in the first piece I painted which is the tallest one on the left of the photo.

Leaded panel using colour samples with silver stain across the middle and sheets of silver stain in the window.

So I thought it was about time to test and label my eight silver stains. The variations in colour are shown below where I have put all the pieces together on the lightbox. I’ve used 6mm and 2mm float glass, testing how each stain changed on a sandblasted surface, on the tin side, when the painted surface is put up or down in the kiln, and whether the colour is better when fired at a lower temperature. As shown below, I can get pretty much any shade of yellow, ochre and brown that I want, and in combination with enamels on the other side of the glass I will be able to make any colours in the red, orange and green ranges too.