My wife and I have some friends who do fantastic work - Rich has done everything from repairing burnouts in Baltimore to teaching sculpture at Dennison to making jewelry to fabricating tools to cabinetry to handiman work (electric, plumbing, foundation repair, carpentry, etc., etc.) to tattooing - there's just nothing he can't do.  His wife is a fantastic artist, and a painter, and can do about anything that involves finishing work.  They're really fun people, and amazing artists.  They used to work on a house we were renting in, and when we bought our own house, we had them help us out with anything that came up.

 

We've been wanting to commission some stained glass pieces from them for a while now, so we finally saved up some money and budgeted it in with a half bath we had them put in (our house only had one full bath upstairs, but we had a perfect spot for a half bath on the first floor).  Yesterday I took the day off work to help on the install...

 

Here's the half bath they just finished, pre-stained glass:

 

 

 

And the stained glass...first the piece in the high window above the sink, from the bathroom side - it's a background of a black baroque glass, with green and purple leaves on brownish vines:

 

 

...and from the other side, in the sun room:

 

 

This is Rich installing the piece in the transom above the french doors he built three years ago - clear baroque with green and purple leaves again, different pattern, with lighter vines:

 

 

 

...and this was the main piece.  It's all opaque glass so that you can't see someone in the bathroom...we tested it out last night, and you can't see a thing through it - that was the worry, that we'd need a privacy curtain or something in the bathroom, but even if you get close to the window from the outside, the glass blurrs everything completely...

 

 

Here's a shot with the two half bath pieces, plus a reflection of the tree in the mirror:

 

 

Here's some shots I took last night after dark, with the windows back-lit.  This shot definitely doesn't do it justice - it loses the greens entirely, and darkens all the brown-reds and splashes of yellows and such...any advice on how I can get a better shot of this?

 

 

...with the door closed:

 

 

 

 

Wow that is really, really cool!  Not only are they beautiful themselves, the whole idea of an opaque (or sort of translucent) stained-glass window on the bathroom is really interesting.

 

On the night pictures... maybe try changing the white balace?  Assuming your camera has that option, that is.

 

Does this bit of Photoshopping help at all? (Apart from increasing the noise.)

Definitely does...I've only seen it at night one time now, and the photo is blending in my head with what I saw, so at this point I can't remember if that's actually what it really was or not...I think I do control the balance, and the exposure, and maybe the f-stop, but I'm not sure on that...

Very nice, they almost looks old. I like the transoms especially, and the bead board ceilings.

 

Walking around old neighborhoods in Hamilton, Middletown, Franklin, Oxford, etc., I notice it seems like almost every home, even the modest ones, feature some kind of stained glass item, wheather that be a small window usually near the staircase, a transom over the front door, or stained glass in the top frame of double hung windows. The art must have been less expensive at one time.

Wow that's a really cool concept. I really like the colors and the design.

Very nice. Does your friend do any Frank Lloyd Wright glass work?

He can do anything - a straight copy of a piece, or something original but in a certain style, or something inspired by something else, loosely based on it...in our case, we really dug the Tree of Life from the Gamble House in Pasadena:

 

 

When we decided to have a piece done, we remembered this from an Arts and Crafts style book - our house is Arts and Crafts, so it seemed an appropriate homage - but the more we looked at it, the less we liked the bulbous look, and it seemed pretty lifeless.  That was about all Nicki had to go on to design it...

 

Anyway, yeah, they could do whatever someone wanted...I can get their information to anyone interested...

Gorgeous work!

WOW!  It looks GREAT!!  I remember going to that bathroom! ;)

On Saturday I helped Rich out installing another stained glass piece he and Niki had done.  This was in new construction out in Anderson Township.  The house has a whirlpool bathtub right under a big-ass window, and there will be a house going in probably 20 feet away or so - so opacity was the word of the day.  The customers knew about what they wanted and picked out the palate, and Rich and Niki went to town...here's the piece post-install:

 

 

 

 

We all thought it actually looked best from outside - the bricks really frame it well.

 

 

^We all thought it actually looked best from outside - the bricks really frame it well.

 

Really?  I have to say I think it looks better on the inside.  Anyway, your friend is really talented and using stained glass to get light into a bathroom while maintaing privacy is a great idea.  Thanks for the photos.

Very nice!

That looks fantastic!!