Hank Silver, an American carpenter helping to repair Notre Dame after the devastating fire it suffered in 2019, told the New York Times in March that he cherishes the opportunity to view up close what will soon be inaccessible on the cathedral’s soaring walls: stained glass. Most people engage with stained glass at a distance—the distance between a pew and a window high above, or the distance between a museum barrier and a display. From such distances stained glass appears flat. What is in fact a mosaic of colored shards pieced together with beads of lead, brass, zinc, or copper becomes a smooth, unified surface. The window may be clear and beautiful, but the hand of the maker is obscured, along with the ingenuity and careful technique by which the window came to be.
But stained glass can be studied closely, showing off its multi-dimensionality, in the intimacy of residential interiors. Our adventure in that world begins with a bit of heterodoxy. We found ourselves in a basement in the Hudson River valley, passing through a warren of meticulously sorted archives before ascending a narrow staff stairway. Hunching to negotiate a cramped doorframe, we emerged at last into the glowing, colored light that filters through the entry hall of Wilderstein, a nineteenth-century house museum in the village of Rhinebeck. This wasn’t the way the builders had intended the room to be entered, but Duane Watson, Wilderstein’s curator for the past thirty-six years, had taken us the long way around to experience the home the way he does: through twists and turns leading to moments of Queen Anne–revival grandeur.
Wilderstein was constructed along Italianate lines by Thomas Holy Suckley (1810–1888), a scion of New York’s prominent Livingston and Beekman families, in 1852. The addition of Queen Anne–revival stylings—including molded metal trims, wood carvings, gilded ceilings, embossed leather walls, and fanciful glasswork—was overseen by Suckley’s son Robert (1856– 1921) during a rapid renovation in 1888, with help from interior designer Joseph Burr Tiffany (1856–1917).
Glass in the Wilderstein windows is faceted, domed, purposefully chipped, and textured. In some windows, the patterns are orderly and symmetrical. In others, they feel fantastical. In the library, a trio of windows appears to vibrate, as irregular blue, yellow, orange, and red glass pebbles dance in the light like candle flames. It isn’t known who did the windows for Burr Tiffany’s Wilderstein interior. The details, however, build on techniques like “broken jewel work” used by the artists John La Farge (1835–1910) and Mary Elizabeth Tillinghast (1845–1912) at around the same time. Most of all, however, they owe a creative debt to Burr Tiffany’s famous cousin, Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The better-known Tiffany wasn’t the first designer to use stained glass in domestic settings. But he was seemingly among the first to realize that such a close-up treatment brought all the medium’s capabilities—texture, density, opacity, blending, iridescence—into play.
Through his father, Charles (1812–1902), founder of Tiffany and Company, Louis Tiffany learned the power of cultivating a “look,” says Jennifer Thalheimer, director and chief curator at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, which houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of Tiffany’s works. He started as a painter, but an obsession with light led him to glass, mosaic, and metal. These materials allowed him to play with light in a new way, and pieces like the Butterfly Window in the Morse Museum illustrate how Tiffany combined semi-translucent stained glass and reflective mosaic to let light in during the day, while reflecting the glow of a home from within at night.
“It was his life’s goal,” Thalheimer says, “to make [materials] into beautiful environments.” Laurelton Hall was Tiffany’s magnum opus, a Long Island residence and temple to his design sensibility that put residential stained glass front and center. After twin disasters—much of Laurelton Hall’s interiors were disassembled and sold in 1946, and a fire in 1957 destroyed what was left of the house—the Morse Museum’s founders, Hugh J. and Jeannette Genius McKean, began the laborious process of hunting down scattered pieces of glass and metal and re-creating architectural settings, ulti-mately bringing back to life spaces like Laurelton Hall’s dining room and the Daffodil Terrace, now installed at the museum.
The motion captured in well-done glasswork is entrancing—light penetrating, bouncing off, and refracting through stained-glass windows turns them into dynamic objects begging to be engaged with tactilely. Denver interior designer Nadia Watts, a great-great-granddaughter of Louis Tiffany, translated objects from the Tiffany Glass Archive at the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in Queens, New York, into a fabric collection for Kravet in 2022, with the goal of capturing that same feeling of dynamism and energy. “I wanted people to want to touch the fabrics in the same way you want to touch the glass,” Watts says.
When Arlie Sulka, owner of the iconic Tiffany dealer Lillian Nassau, which is credited with reviving the collector’s market with the help of clients like the Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin, learned of Watts’s fabric collection, it made sense to take the exercise full circle. She has the heavily textured, jewel-toned fabrics in her office, and when we spoke was waiting for a 140-year-old Tiffany settee to arrive. She plans to reupholster the piece in one of Watts’s designs. “Tiffany,” she says, “meets Tiffany.”
Sulka has firsthand experience of the intense market for Tiffany, and the general interest in glass, through her firm and as an expert on Antiques Roadshow. Over two decades with the show she’s given six-figure valu-ations for genuine Tiffany—and has had to break it to many hawkers of heirlooms that their treasures have plenty of sentimental value, yes, but little value the market will recognize. Most Tiffany glass windows that come up for auction are ecclesiastical, and prices regularly top $100,000. La Farge windows usually go for tens of thousands.
The idea of making stained glass more accessible through residential usage isn’t without a touch of irony, given the price point. The most eye-catching contemporary stained glass—by Theodore Ellison or Judson Studios, for example—is, by virtue of its labor-intensiveproduction process, very expensive. Interior designer Hallie Goodman accessed the look for a few fewer zeros in a Brooklyn town house recently profiled in Architectural Digest by having a set of antique stained-glass pieces stabilized by a restorer. Her ingenuity harks back to when the McKeans went digging in the rubble at Laurelton Hall to find fragments of Tiffany rooms to reassemble. Decorative details, like a pair of unusual Tiffany valances made from rows and columns of small favrile glass disks set in brass bezels, recently sold by Lillian Nassau, may be a happy medium, a way of incorporating original Tiffany material into an interior without the need for remodeling—albeit not at a massive cost saving.
Given these economical constraints, the future of stained glass in domestic interiors isn’t straightforward. But then, neither was the path from Notre Dame to Louis C. to Burr to Watts. What is clear, however, is the timeless desire to bring an otherworldly beauty into the realms of mere mortals, a desire that, along with the urge to satisfy it in creative ways, isn’t likely to fade anytime soon.
