Art in a House Made of Glass
Homes here are built around the view, and rightly so. Walls of glass, open sightlines, the desert brought right up to the room.
It also leaves you with two problems nobody mentions at closing. You have fewer walls than you thought, and the ones you have get a lot of sun. Both are solvable, and neither is a reason to want less glass.
First, find the walls you actually have
Stand in the room and turn slowly. In most glass forward houses there are three or four genuinely usable walls, and they are almost never the ones people expect.
The wall behind the sofa, facing the glass, is usually the best in the house. It is in shade for most of the day because the glass is opposite it, and it is the wall everyone looks at while sitting down. That is the one.
The wall you see as you come in from the hall or the entry. Often narrow, often overlooked, and it works hard because everyone passes it.
And the returns, meaning the short wall segments between window runs. People dismiss them as too small. A narrow vertical piece in a return can be one of the best moves in the whole room, because it sits inside the architecture rather than fighting it.
The glare problem, which is real
A piece hung directly opposite a big window can be difficult to see at certain hours, because the glass throws light straight back off the surface and you get reflection instead of painting.
This is why unglazed work often does better in glass houses than framed work under glass. A textured painted surface scatters light instead of bouncing it, and it stays readable in conditions where a framed piece under glass turns into a mirror.
If you love a piece that is framed under glass, ask about non reflective conservation glazing. It costs more and it genuinely solves this.
What the sun actually reaches
Watch the room in late afternoon in summer, which is the harshest it gets. Notice the bright shape on the wall and where it travels.
Then simply do not hang anything you love in that shape. Everything else in the room is fine, and the shape is usually much smaller than people fear.
If the wall you want is in it, a shade you actually close in the afternoon fixes it completely. That is not a compromise, that is just how people live in bright houses.
A thought about competing with the view
The other thing about a glass house is that the best thing in the room is often outside it.
Work that tries to out-compete a desert view usually loses. Work with real surface and texture does something different, because it responds to the same light coming through that glass and changes with it through the day. It joins the room instead of arguing with it.
The Sedona Earth and Companion Works pieces are built for exactly that kind of light.
If you have a glass room you have not solved, send me a photo and tell me which way it faces. These are my favorite rooms to work on.
Warmly,
Dani
