An Oversized Quilt-Style Grand Window on Dupont

Sometimes when you first examine a window, you have look closely to see anything wrong. Not this time! This beauty on Dupont got whacked long ago, by a ball or a bird, and it’s hard to miss.

These things are rare, for good reason. This is the Quilt Style of the early 1880s, suddenly confronted with a new scale of building. It’s too big. The individual panes on this thing are too big. Even of you can make them in the shop, can you install them? When the pieces get too big, they break. This one, like others at that moment, was an easy job for the glaziers but a nightmare for the installers. They only really happened in 1886 and 1887, after which they were considered unprofessional.

Laid out in the sunlight, Oh the poor thing! And, the oddities emerge. Why is the border made of random chunks? They’re all the same colour, almost, but what’s with the texture. and why does sometimes face in, and sometimes out?

The whole thing is a bit brutish. The cutting is pretty approximate, which is covered by the wide flanges on the lead. The soldering is nicer. I start to think that the main panels and the border are not the work of the same person.

I don’t have to use my knife on this one, because I have a big hole to start from. It comes apart nicely. The wooden frame looks worse than it it, and will be sanded down by the contractor, and then the opening will be updated. In this case, the renovated window is going to be a bit bigger than the original, because the poor thing was built with no edging at all, and it needs one.

The glory of this piece, and my terror as I work with it, is this green. It is rare and perfect, but also deeply flawed, with a strong diagonal ripple and lots of structurally menacing bubbles. I adore it. Because the pieces are so big, I’m amazed it hasn’t broken yet. This becomes my main job: fix the window, sure, but do not break the green.

It’s a big worry. This window is too big. Some of those pieces are ten inches long. There are reasons we don’t do this now.

In a city of dirty Victorian windows, this one has a special place in my heart. Wow! This one had everything. Paint, putty, plaster, old style oil enamel, epoxy! You never see that. And then there were all the chemical peculiarities, the gas film, the housepaint patters, and some spray pf something that had slightly etched the surface. And then there was everything all this chemistry had done to the glass.

It was a zoo. The epoxied piece of border, I did break it getting it out. It did get it clean, at the cost of a snap. Honestly, who does that?

While the glass was cleaning, I considered the missing pieces. After consultation with the client, we went for conservation-standard, with the new material clearly visible (and a bit paler). The beer-yellow, which was unusually thick, was a hard match. In the end, we chose to replace both of the upper panels in that colour, to keep the window symmetrical.

Once it was pretty and clean, with its bits filled in, it revealed itself to be gorgeous, and very difficult to work on. How could I turn it over? Would I ever get it down the stairs? Or would I just snap it in half, because it’s so long and so frail?

On car wash day (as I call it), the green was so merry in the sun. Glass loves to be clean.

Inspecting it clean in the full sun, I saw that one of the bottom pieces had always contained a microcrack, which was only visible from one angle. This was a difficult task, but the window was quite happy by the end.

Back home as if never broken, this window again commands Dupont. Seeing it, I feel very pleased, but I still wonder how it got broken in the first place, because it’s too high up for a ball, and what bird would do it?

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