Stained Glass Window Shades
San Diego, CA

Architect:
Mark Bausback Architects

Hand-felted “Shade” Pulls:
Wild Woolies

Front Windows, Sunrise with Frank Lloyd Wright
6 ranging from 4’-7” wide by 3’-5” ht. to 3’-2” wide by 3’-3” ht.

Side Window, The Early Bird Gets the Bacon
12’-3” wide by 5’-3” ht.

German, French and Polish mouthblown glass, domestic rolled glasses, Austrian lead crystal bevels, lead and solder.

In the mid 1990s, ASG created extensive stained glass for Richard Walker’s Pancake House in Crystal Lake near Chicago (our stained glass can be glimpsed in this video). In 2007 Richard Walker opened his third restaurant in the Gas Lamp District of San Diego and we were asked to make stained glass for the new addition.

Nestled between a soaring high-rise condominium and the dynamic architecture of a hands-on children’s museum, this postage-stamp-sized restaurant is already a landmark, award-winning dining destination to locals and visitors alike – there’s always a line. When ASG was contacted, the interior decor was primarily achromatic earth tones. Besides desiring to introduce lots of color to this lively space, Richard Walker also wanted to continue the stained glass tradition found in Walker restaurants throughout the Chicago area since his father and uncle opened the first Pancake House restaurant in 1960.

At first the idea was to simply install stained glass in the front windows above the line where the outdoor canopy blocks incoming sun. But rather than just using a straight horizontal to define the bottom of the stained glass, variously slanted bottoms for the individual windows were proposed in order to give the stained glass a look reminiscent of pull-down “window shades”. To complete the allusion, a chromatic range of hand-felted “shade pulls” were created by Wild Woolies.

The arched part of the outdoor canopy above the entrance is echoed in a stained glass sunrise. The highly transparent mouthblown glass provide views up to cityscape and sky, while direct morning sun projects color into breakfast time. Austrian lead-crystal prisms also scatter tiny spectra onto diners, waffles and pancakes.

The side window, “The Early Bird Gets the Bacon", includes another sunrise above a green and blue earth.  The Walker Rabbit logo is barely noticeable from inside the restaurant. Because part of the sides of this window are hidden behind pockets in the wall, the Rabbit isn't fully visible until one looks back from the parking garage.