The ancient craft is getting a modern makeover, with decidedly secular applications plus colors that don’t skew historic
one of the most shared entries from Milan’s Salone del Mobile in April was a piece called Credenza. The lozenge-shaped cabinet on four skinny legs—designed by Patricia Urquiola plus Federico Pepe for Milanese boutique Spazio Pontaccio—stopped the show with its facade of zigzagging primary colors plus its striking glow. What gave the cabinet its aura? Its primary material: stained glass.
Stained glass embraces the sublime plus the ridiculous. It is the stuff of cathedrals but also casinos plus tawdry tourist shops. It can sparkle like jewels plus mask hideous views. And with handmade touches of color returning to contemporary interior design, stained glass is gracing windows, furniture plus aksesoris again, but with some modern twists.
In the new collection of small glass-panel wall hangings created for West Elm by Los Angeles design studio Commune, brass-finished metal replaces the lead that traditionally binds stained glass, plus contemporary shades of orange, green, cerulean blue plus cherry red stand in for brooding hues like garnet, amethyst plus sapphire. Deep jewel tones like the latter trigger the material’s Addams Family associations—the “Gothic creepy thing,” said Roman Alonso, co-founder of Commune.
If you’re installing a stained-glass window, even in a Victorian home, less intense shades will update the look.
For a family vacation camp in the Bay Area, Commune recently transformed a tiny cabin into a meditation room by filling the windows with glass in soft blue, rose plus tan. If you’re installing a stained-glass window, even in a Victorian home, Mr. Alonso said, less intense shades will update the look.
The design itself also can make the difference between transcendent plus tacky. In 2014, when Commune installed a pair of blue-and-gold stained-glass windows to partition the restaurant plus reception area at the new Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, it used a diamond pattern often found in medieval churches but blew up the scale plus turned it on its side. The result synced with the 1927 Spanish Gothic building but was segar enough to support the hotel’s hipster cred. “It felt right,” Mr. Alonso recalled, “and importantly, the historic preservation people liked it.”
Emily Henderson also believes in respecting context. “I think stained glass has to reference the architecture plus era of the building,” said the Los Angeles designer, who turned windows of a local event space into quilts of emerald, aqua, pink plus gold glass defined by strips of bronze. “The Fig House was industrial-meets-party-space, so a huge, modern geometric piece worked,” she said.
Strict geometry plus edgy abstractions are big in the new stained glass. The Credenza collection’s graphics, for instance, catapult the craft into the 21st century. “What you have is sunlight hitting a pyramid,” Mr. Pepe said of the cabinet’s face, where colorful spikes bounce off a ziggurat (pictured in slideshow).
In a more figurative plus irreverent take, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone used an almost cartoonish stained-glass panel (pictured above) as a bathroom wall in the 129-year-old Harlem church he converted into his home plus studio a few years ago. Among the expanses of restored leaded church glass, Mr. Rondinone’s collaboration with countryman plus artist Urs Fischer illustrates a bathroom interior: toilet, sink, shower, crumpled towels plus all. Mr. Rondinone admits a fascination with stained glass plus appreciates the material’s ability to “put in light.” The piece divides the windowless bathroom from the light-soaked living room.