Staircase Window - Private Villa - Nairobi

This window was commissioned for this staircase location. Very little direction was given by the clients other than to feature the African sun and to make it joyous and a celebration.

The steel grid was already in place as a security measure. We designed this piece to use that grid. The idea of using surface-fused bright coloured glass was influenced by the Matisse paper cutout collages. The glass, Bullseye Glass, is created to allow the various colours of glass to be fused—melted together—and this is what we did in this project. The individual pieces of glass are cut, leaving the normal gap between pieces, but instead of adding lead, we left this as a white line. The glass is surface fused, meaning that the glass doesn’t melt into the base glass but remains raised, creating shadows and highlights on the edges.

The development of glass saws and cutting discs allowed glass cutting that would not have been possible in earlier generations. We find this method to be very exciting and it gives a much cleaner feel than working with leading or copper foil.