Bathroom Windows

This winter we’ve painted our hall spaces pinky grey, a colour that we chose to compliment the greens and oranges we had in our interiors. The hall is lit by a concealed strip light and although it looked fine as it was I thought I could add something more to the space by making a glass panel to cover it. You can see it installed with the light on and off below.

Left: All three windows with the lights on. Right: Ceiling and door window with the lights off.

The new panel had to go with the windows I’d made in 2005 for the house, two of which you can see at the same time as the new one (above left). For our own windows I’ve used intricate, geometric patterns - I see these windows as an opportunity to use favourite designs that didn’t quite fit in to the schemes I was working on at the time. The bathroom window has a pink/green/gold repeating circle which looks great from a distance (below left) and the door panels have pale blue flower/stars floating across olive green horizontal bands on an etched background. You can see how good these colours look with the lovely brown quarry tiles and red brick of the bathroom walls below.

Inside the bathroom - Left: window. Right: door.

So for the new design I plotted out a flower/star design on a hexagonal grid, thinking of the central flower as a burst of light from the centre. Each point meets another point, but the geometry is not organised into a regular pattern. I wanted the colour to change in the middle as this panel is at a meeting point with a door to the left and the right, and I also wanted it to go with the plate that greets visitors to the spare room on the left which we bought from Rob Turner (below left). As usual the colours, which are transparent fired enamels made of a mix of different pigments, aren’t exactly as I’d planned, the yellow is not quite olive enough and the pink is too dark. However the window sits very well in its place, it’s nice to look up and see a few unexpectedly twinkly stars inside the house.

Outside the bathroom - Left: light on. Right: light off.

New ceiling panel, 210 x 620 mm.

Moving Windows

Rectangular fanlight window, private house Devizes, 2004.

Occasionally friends commissions me to make windows for their houses. These commissions often provide an opportunity for me to do what I think would look good in the space, rather than design something to a theme that has to be approved by a committee. The fanlight windows commissioned by friends in Devizes in 2004 and 2008, shown above and below, show my preference for order and geometry. They looked good installed above the front and back doors and when the friends moved they wanted to take them to the new house, although not quite sure of where they would fit.

Square fanlight window, private house Devizes 2008.

Detail showing quarter circle and original collage design.

Rectangular window moved to private house, Bristol and during installation (with coincidental matching t-shirt design).

It was perfectly easy to take the glass panels out, give them a good clean and find them new spaces. The rectangular window had its ends chopped off and was put in front of the existing reeded glass above a bedroom door. The bar that divides the window in two goes well with the sandblasted lines on the design, which flew out of the sides of the panel even before the chopping.

The square window, which has always been one of my favourite designs, was easy to miss in its previous high up home so in the new house they wanted to hang it lower down in one of the conservatory windows. As it is big (790 x 815 mm) and heavy, we had to place it on fixed rods rather than in a hanging frame with the sandblasted section, originally at the top to hide bits of the ceiling, at the bottom. You can now appreciate all the hand painted detail in this panel and it looks especially good from the outside, surrounded by plants.

Square window moved to conservatory of Bristol house, from outside and inside.

Please don’t let the fact that you may move some time in the future put you off commissioning me, windows are very easy to move to a new place - as any church crawler knows.