Wine Bottle Bottoms.

I was going to wait until we were 100% done with the Roman shades and curtains for the living room and dining room to post some photos, but I just had to share this awesome piece of artwork we had made for the foyer.

Let's flash back to when we first bought the casa. The foyer window was advertised as a stained glass window in the literature on the house, but as soon as we saw it in person it was pretty clear that they justed used a fake stained glass film you can get at Home Depot. Nice try.

We peeled this right off on Day 1. I'd rather have the plain glass than a horrible looking film.

Thus began the search for some real stained glass. We hunted high and we hunted low, but just couldn't find anything that we really liked. Everything we came across was "florally" and just way too expensive. I was going to spend $1000 bucks on something I really didn't like. So the search carried on. We even found a local guy who was going to build a new piece of stained glass for us but in the end it wasn't going to look right so the process just sort of fizzeled out.

In early April I had been watching an episode of This Old House where they were out in California and the host had taken a side trip from the project house to view an old Mission style home on the coast in Santa Barbara. There was a great glass window that they spoke about made entirely of bottoms from wine bottles. It looked amazing and I thought that maybe we could do something like that for our window. I hoped onto the internet and began searching...

After about 15 minutes I came across this:

A guy in North Carolina made them from wine bottle bottoms and attached them just like a stained glass window. This piece was selling for a reasonable $75bucks so I emailed him to see if he'd be able to make something that would fit our windows dimensions.

Well sure enough, after about a week of emailing back and forth with George McGinn of Glass Designs by George McGinn we placed the order. Now we just had to sit back and wait for George to work his magic. It only took him about 2 weeks to put it all together and send it up via FedEx. George is retired, lives down in NC, and makes some pretty amazing stained glass type pieces in his spare time.

It finally arrived last week and we got it hung over the weekend. As soon as I took it out of the box I knew it was going to be perfect.

Here's a little close-up showing some of the detail.

Pretty amazing stuff...and to think, we got this all coordinated over the internet and email! If you're in the market for something like this be sure to contact George and let him know I sent ya.

Once we get some fabrics picked out for shades in the living room and curtains in the dining room I'll be sure to do another post showing the new paint colors and the the carpets by Flor. Then we'll hopefully be done with these rooms. Hang tight...

Comments

What a beautiful, unique and special piece of art. Kudos for not settling on something less than what you had envisioned and for pursuing this. Only thing that would make it better would be if it was made from a collection of wine bottles you and Kelly had shared over the years (though I suppose you can embellish and just tell people that ...).

Posted by: Maureen (L.) W. | May 12, 2011 at 11:14 AM