Good news for the guest cottage and all of mankind! While the electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and framing haven’t started, I’ve dedicated hours upon hours designing the stained glass doors that will go into the toilet room that lives inside the bathroom. And I have almost zero guilt about it (“almost” because when the electrician arrived and my lighting plan wasn’t fully dialed in, I wondered if I should have shifted some priorities). But these doors are the jumping off point, as they say, and they are giving me creative fuel to pull together the whole bathroom, which in a way bleeds into designing the look and feel of the rest of the house. I’m ecstatic. Now, if you are just tuning in to this project, read this post about the goals with it (but it’s meant to be a design laboratory for me, with no pressure to be perfect or done soon, just impractical creative experimentation and unbridled fun). Now…onto those doors.

It’s going to be quite the unexpected moment, and that’s even before you open up and discover what’s inside. The structure of the outhouse will be paneled to have “siding” and painted a dark color (unsure of what actual color, but we chose Hague Blue here), and behind it will be a reddish reclaimed wood wall (hopefully).

The Inspiration Doors

These vintage doors were the inspiration for the whole thing. I found them at Aurora Mills, and I could have just bought them and fixed them up, but why do that when you can spend days, weeks, and thousands of dollars making your own??? The real reason I didn’t snag these is two-fold: 1. They were 18″ each, which meant the opening would be 36″ in total – obviously fine for daily use, but so annoying to shoot. And I need great photos of this because I’m really planning on breaking the internet with my urinal moment (hoping that sentence goes on my gravestone), so to not really be able to capture the inside easily is a bummer. This is the case for a lot of our bathrooms that we design and shoot, and we make it work, but it’s always challenging. And 2. I wanted to explore stained glass and see what my version of this door would be – this felt like such a fun opportunity to learn and teach. You might say that the privacy issue of the clear glass panels would have been a hindrance, but I could have solved that with opaque glass or a little door curtain on the inside.

The Doors I Bought

These here are my vintage ladies. Now I could have started from scratch, but I need/love that vintage soul in my life (and house). These (also from Aurora Mills) were the right size and had ample opportunity to add any stained glass colors I wanted, in whatever configuration, so the creative freedom was too tempting. Even better, Nathan, from AM, is their resident stained glass repair person, and he is going to coach me through refurbishing them (and then I’ll show you). I think they were $1,200, which wasn’t nothing, but AM had given me a lot of credit since I donated a ton of built-ins, doors, a bathtub, and shelving salvaged from both our houses. (Hilariously, I wish I had one of the bookshelves back and the clawfoot tub – whoops. Let this be a lesson that you should hoard everything for your entire life!)

Removal Of Original Glass

Some of the glass was damaged, some was missing, and frankly, none of it was special. I was attracted to the scale and the configuration of the glass. So Nathan carefully removed each piece of glass so that we could choose whatever colors we wanted.

A blank canvas. While he did that, I went shopping.

He had to scrape the putty off each and clean it up. The goal here is to get it “dipped and stripped” to take off the original paint. Then we’ll patch, sand, and paint it whatever color we want, and THEN put the new glass in. But before we could choose the paint color, we had to choose the glass colors, which was so exciting.

Now, in case you are a long-time follower (bless you, thank you, I love you), you might remember the massive stained glass doors from The Fig House that I designed with Judson Studios. So technically I had done this before, but it’s been 12 years, and honestly, I love colored glass so much that I wanted to do it again (but it felt kinda weird at the mountain house, farmhouse, or river house). But this quirky cottage could absolutely handle some stained glass.

Choosing The New Stained Glass Colors

So we went to Bullseye Glass in Portland, which is an incredible resource. They have a massive inventory, plus they make their glass right there in their factory. The salespeople were wonderful (so helpful and accommodating, and no, they didn’t know who I was, so it wasn’t special treatment) and had such enthusiasm for the craft, full of tidbits and tips, suggestions. This is why I love Portland, BTW. The maker vibe here is alive and well, and everyone is so supportive of each other. I asked so many basic/dumb questions that were answered so nicely (I feel like in LA I would have been treated as some sort of competitor just for trying my hand at a craft that I had no right to attempt).

Marlee and Gretch asked me, “So how do you want to do this?” as if I had a “proper plan”. HA. I was a kid in a candy store, and my “plan” was for my eyes and gut to collaborate and tell my hands which colors to pull. This collaboration would likely take hours. 🙂

I grabbed far more than we’d ever need and then played and played and played. Gretch and Marlee pulled their favorite colors and just arranged and rearranged for a while. Nothing was off the table.

The biggest consideration here isn’t actually the color of the glass; it’s how it’s going to read in the room, both in the day and at night. Some of the transparent colors read as black without any light behind them. And some that were more opaque held their saturation regardless of light. I knew that I didn’t want to go subtle (the whole point is to add color instead of clear). And I definitely had cobalt, red, and amber in mind (inspired by those original doors, actually). But I love all rosy tones and greens, too…

They had a big light wall you could put them in front, but that’s not really accurate to how your eye would see them, necessarily. It’s so specific to your project.

We ended up buying a lot to try in the room. We knew that we needed to see how it would look vertical in the exact light that it would eventually live. There is a huge window across the room from it, but technically, no natural light inside of it. Real quick: we actually swapped the whole layout to put this in front of the other window that we had planned to remove, and I’ll show you that version another time, but it didn’t end up working for a few reasons – stay tuned.

Holding Up The Glass In The Room

So I stood exactly where the future doors would be and held up each pane so we could take a picture and plug them into the door configuration.

In the space, we decided our least favorite glass panels were Dark Amber (Medium Amber felt too similar and more classic), Butterscotch (too orange and vibrant, and the Golden Green was the better opaque warm shade), Sienna (too brown and read as black without any light), Dusty Lilac (it was pretty but duller in person), and Deep Plum (too dark and Light Violet felt like a better fit).

In our mock-ups, we focused on playing with the other colors, the ones we were most drawn to. But one thing to note is that the glass looks very different when held up to a wood-paneled wall (like above) and to a window. For example, it’s extremely hard to tell the difference between Light Violet and Red until there’s more light on the panes. This is when we seriously considered moving the entire structure to be in front of this window, but for reasons I’ll get into in a different post, we decided to stick with the original plan.

Option A:

We like this one a lot, it feels good and balanced. But it is a lot of blue down the center line.

Option B:

So we decided to swap the bigger blues for Red and Green. Hard to tell here but the Red is translucent and the Moss is not. The Red would still provide enough privacy, but it’s definitely something to think about.

Option C:

For this one we brought the punchy Indigo back to the big panels. I like it!

Option D:

This was Brian’s favorite. I like the contrast between the Red and the Dusty Blue.

When we were considering putting the doors in front of the other window (with light coming from both sides), the glass looked so different. The opaque colors looked the same, but the transparent glass became so saturated.

Use the slider to see how light passing through affects how the colors look. Here we have Moss, Light Violet, Red, Medium Amber, and Dusty Blue (an opaque tile) against the window. Gretch pulled from this image to show the difference in the glass colors, with light and without light.

The red became bright red, the amber went bright yellow, and the violet read as pink. It’s honestly so pretty, but a totally different look.

The Final Decision

Ugh. I love all four. And we have nothing else chosen for this room besides thinking that the wall will be a warm reddish wood (and I’m thinking the toilet and urinal black as to disappear), that’s it. So all the other elements, including the color of the door and structure (right now shown painted Hague Blue), can be selected based on this decision.

Weigh in in the comments please!!!! If you want to suggest a different layout or a combination of the above, I’m all ears.