New Front Door Window

I’ve just installed a design for an actual window, the first in quite a while. It felt good to be working out a design for the constraints of a shape, long and thin, and the clients’ preferences, simple, blue and with a touch of the organic. Once I got back into the stride of architectural glass design as opposed to making exhibition pieces, all went well. You can see the final design as it progressed in the drawings on my studio wall below.

Full size designs, 1320 x 150 mm, drawn in this order (from left to right) 5, 4, 1, 2, 3

Samples, enamel and sandblasting on glass.

The glass samples (above) I made at the end of this stage show the basic idea, a pattern of triangles with two stems of plants growing in the gaps between them. The detail comes from the intersection of the stems and the triangle points, you get thin lines of clear glass in the outlines of the leaves while the white triangles are sandblasted and therefore opaque.

The window is in a front door and is double glazed. We realised that you could get a more interesting effect by using both panes of glass with parts of the design on each pane, something I’ve done before, so that the two layers shift against each other as you move around, as in the two layered samples I made next (below).

Samples on two layers of glass.

Front door with design in vinyl - left: first layer inside, centre: second layer outside, right: both layers from the inside.

However, our plans had to change with the news that we couldn’t change the double glazed unit in the front door without getting a whole new front door (because of warranty not technical issues). We decided it was fine to go with the design printed on vinyl, that is adhesive window film, instead. As you can see above, the new window looks completely different from the outside and the inside, with a different part of the design printed on the interior and the exterior film. Although the colour printed on the vinyl is not as transparent as the blue and green enamels would have been the window does the job of providing privacy in the hallway while letting you know who is at the front door.

Details of completed window, 2 layers of vinyl.

Hops

This house really needed new stained glass panels in its front door - the leaded lights continued to deteriorate (above) while I made the windows which were fitted earlier this month (below). The new windows do a good job of obscuring direct visibility on to the busy street, while letting patches of coloured light into the house which used to be a pub and brew house - hence the hops in my design.

Hop windows, left from the inside, right from the outside.

Branches of dried hops: section of window design: sketch design for the three windows

I really wanted the plant to look like hop, rather then grape, vines. I gave them particularly thin, twisty stems, small leaves and an extra firing of acid yellow on the hops themselves, which are actual size. Pictures taken on the lighbox during the making (below) show the play of painted patterned pieces from my scrapbox, and how the blocks move diagonally across the design. When the hop vines surround them, the coloured blocks are intertwined with a curvy pattern in green and sandblasted white.

Details of the left hand panel (above) and the top right corner (below) show how the colours and textures change with the background to the window - obvious really. On the left the details are seen on a lightbox, on the right they have been installed in the front door and, as they should, look much better there with sparkling colours and highlights.