Dear Melissa:
I loved your room at the Guilford showhouse a few years ago. The bathroom is really stunning. I would kill for that awesome shower curtain. I could tell the trim was real jade. The glass walls kind of confused me, though. I still don’t quite understand how they were done. Were the walls painted and then covered with the sheets of glass? G.B., Madison, CT
Dear G.:
Thank you for supporting the showhouse, and for the compliment. (I need all the encouragement I can get.) The amazing onyx sink in the bathroom required equally dramatic surroundings, which explains the silk-and-jade shower curtain and the glass walls.
I love to experiment and push the envelope in showhouses, because there is no client to disappoint. Since my two favorite surface materials are metal and glass, they came to mind immediately. Metal was too contemporary for this space, so I chose to create something special in glass. Hence the unique walls.
Reverse-painted glass itself is not new. The Chinese have been doing it for centuries. It was also popular in this country during the Art Deco period, although mostly on picture frames and mirrors. You may be familiar with Eglomise, the French name for gilded and reverse-painted glass.
As its name implies, reverse painting is painting in the opposite order. Consider normal painting, where an artist paints the background first, builds up each layer, and then ends with the foreground. When one paints on the back of clear glass, the order is reversed, starting with the foreground. This way when the glass is turned over, the foreground is uppermost. As you can imagine, this requires a lot of skill and practice.
As far as I know, reverse-painted walls are unheard of. Think of them as glass wallpaper.
I needed a truly adventurous artist, so I asked Randy Davis, of Off The Wall Murals, in Killingworth, CT, to create the walls for me. He’s incredibly talented, and has done work for Disney, Paramount Studios, and Warner Brothers, among others. I knew if anyone could figure out how to do this, he could. And he did. Beautifully.
The glass company solved the problems of the physical constraints and how to affix the panels to the walls, and we were good to go. (So what if I had a few sleepless nights until we were sure this would work. That’s what it means to do a showhouse.) M.A.K.
