A touch of glass

Stan Price may own an art glass shop, but he doesn’t live in a glass house.

Drive by his classic 1920s north Everett home and you’d never know what he does for a living. You won’t see elaborate stained glass windows or the trendy sidelight next to the door.

But there is glass here. Nearly every room inside includes some small touch: a lamp, a skylight, a transom built into a bookcase. Outside, he arranged glass into a mosaic on planters and a bench.

Stained glass isn’t just for church windows and Victorian manses. Sure, it can be elaborate and ornate. It also can be clean-lined and contemporary. Any home can benefit from the judicious use of decorative glass, said Price, who has owned Covenant Art Glass in Everett with wife Colleen for more than 25 years. The trick is letting form follow function, letting the style and age of the home dictate what’s appropriate, he said.

A peek in their home provides some ideas for incorporating decorative glass into the home.

The unused space above the kitchen cabinets: Most modern cabinets stretch all the way to the ceiling or include a row of unreachable storage. When the couple remodeled their kitchen, they used that row of hard-to-reach storage space as a place to display a collection of antique Ball canning jars. The cabinets have glass fronts framed in green hand-rolled opalescent glass. The color accent sets off the white cabinets and doesn’t compete with the canning jar collection.

In the bookcase: A small amount of glass can make a powerful visual statement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the den, where the top part of a pair of built in bookcases is fitted with decorative glass in a floral design. It’s not a lot, but the small touch gives the room character, and they are also lighted from the back, producing a soft, colorful source of light at night. “It just made the room feel richer,” Colleen Price said.

Lamps: This is Stan Price’s favorite way to add decorative glass to the home. The reason? Lamps and other lighting fixtures can come with if you move. They can get passed on to the children when it’s time. Several of the rooms have ceiling lights, including a chandelier based on a design by American glass great Louis Comfort Tiffany. Price adapted the design, changing Old-World roses to modern hybrid tea varieties like the ones he grows in his garden.

Transforming a junk find: Price fitted a generic wall sconce he found on a clearance table with a piece of hand-rolled glass. The granite-like texture of the glass creates a diffused, translucent lighting effect on the den wall. The cost for adding the glass: about $30. Customers regularly bring lanterns and other forms into his shop and request something similar.

A skylight: Once a year in the summer the light hits the upstairs bathroom just right and a flood of light comes through a skylight over the shower casting a floral design below.

In a room that needs privacy: The downstairs bathroom looks over a patio and garden. The room needed light and privacy. Stan Price created a window using glass with a combination of glue-chip texture and bevels. The glue-chip texture is glue that’s been applied to the glass and then sandblasted creating a rough texture. The bevels are slanted cuts in the glass. The textured glass lets in plenty of light but no one can see in, even at night with the lights on inside, he said. The advantage of choosing clear glass with a pattern: it fits with any decor and never goes out of style.

In the garden: Glass decorates stepping stones, and is glued onto containers in a colorful mosaic. Price created a trellis from copper pipe fused with glass squares, providing something beautiful to rest the eye on even in winter.

Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@ heraldnet.com.