By Aimee Farrell
“We are all trying to view reality through a filter,” says Parisian interior designer Pierre Marie. “And stained glass has a kind of magic that enables you to see the outside world through this beautiful, dreamlike lens.” Its real power? “In telling stories. If it is too abstract or conceptual, then what stories are we leaving behind?”
Marie is one of a new cohort of designers and decorators playing with the resplendent, if restrictive, charms of stained glass. “Its limitations are its strength,” said Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite pioneer whose richly decorative windows formed the bedrock of a major Arts and Crafts revival of the art in the 19th century. Stained glass had spent centuries in the design doldrums when Burne-Jones and others, working with William Morris, beamed its dazzlingly colourful rays beyond churches and into Victorian homes.
Marie’s compelling glass designs — created in collaboration with stained-glass specialist Ateliers Duchemin — springboard from this history. They include an Art Nouveau embodiment in his newly refurbished headquarters and a complex 16-panel piece for the private salon of Hermès’s recently opened Vienna store. But they also take stained glass design into new narrative terrain. A diptych in Marie’s own Nouvelle Athènes home preserves his Algerian partner’s crimson-tinged memory of a Saharan desert sandstorm. Vividly crystalline folding screens offer instant gratification: no installation required.
Stained glass as both a visual reminder of the history of a home and a reflection of the stories of its inhabitant is a dichotomy Texas-raised, London-based interior designer Brandon Schubert has drawn on to scintillating effect. He advises taking cues from the architecture of the setting, weaving in personal narratives and carefully considering the impact on the existing interior. “Red and blue glass has a huge effect on the quality of light; yellow and green glass less so,” says Schubert, who works with Herefordshire conservationist and artist Jim Budd.
Recent striking pieces include a privacy screen in a client’s bathroom and decorative glass reinstated in the hallway of a late Victorian London home. “The colours you choose depend entirely on the energy level you’re trying to create. It’s a work of art you will see every day; it represents you.”
Patrick Williams, of Bath-based interior design studio Berdoulat, took that sentiment to heart when he commissioned artisan Jamie Clark to make a stained glass panel to mark the 70th birthday of his late father. A memento of his favourite things, it features 70 roses, asparagus spears and almond blossom. Williams has long been fascinated by stained glass, employing it in residential projects including as a room divider in a shared children’s bedroom, complete with little roundels depicting the occupants in Pre-Raphaelite-style portraits, and pocket doors mirroring the swans and reeds of a client’s watery living room vista of Hampstead ponds.
“As well as creating beautiful shards of coloured light, coming home at night, when it’s backlit, it forms a warm, welcoming glow,” he says.
Stained glass’s sensual, rich appeal is similarly celebrated by the architectural interior designer François-Joseph Graf, who drew on the Morris era when installing windows for London hotel At Sloane. The windows are pared back in their execution and informed by the vernacular of their surroundings. To Graf they are a testament to a quintessentially English, quiet elegance — despite being made in Chartres by Ateliers Loire.
“As a form of privacy in the home, they’re far better than a pair of fluffy curtains,” says Graf, who is currently working on colourful skylight and window designs for a turn-of-the-century Monte Carlo home.
“It’s such a democratic form of decorative art,” says Juliette MacDonald, professor of craft history and theory at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of forthcoming book Illuminating Stained Glass. “Anyone can walk into a church and experience that moving moment when the sun’s rays fill the internal space with colour and drama.” There’s a very particular wonder conjured by more medieval creations — glass was occasionally blended with powdered gold, rubies, sapphires or lapis, in contrast to the more prosaic metal oxides of today.
Although historic stained glass window making is on the red list of endangered crafts (as of 2023, The British Society of Master Glass Painters has 61 accredited members) MacDonald has observed a renewed interest in recent years. “People are recognising that this timeless craft is not opposed to contemporary design — it fits well into homes,” she says.
But would-be practitioners beware: it took three years of evening classes for Benedict Hughes, one half of London design duo Amata Benedict, to create his own painterly window quartet. An ode to Greek philosopher Empedocles and his theory that the world is composed of four elements — fire, air, earth, and water — the workshop window commands more comments from visitors than anything else. “It brings this ecclesiastical air into the most mundane space,” he says. “It gives life.”
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