A woman that works with me's husband (following me?) sometimes blows glass for Chihuly. Don't know him, check out this first:
Chihuly Glass Museum. The interiors group at our office got to have a personal tour of his boathouse where all their glass is blown. A group of men were blowing some beautiful pieces for a chandelier while we were there. The man sitting on the "throne" is the lead colorist and shapes the actual pieces that are fired an brought to him. Mesmerizing process.
But that's just the workshop area. The rest of the boathouse is full of small test versions of installations in the museum and apparently he's a very avid collector of everything. The bathroom walls were lined with first edition children's books and an early edition VW bus and Aston Martin and other fancy cars we wandered through. He collected things that inspired him, the lines of things, the colors, the textures. Sometimes valuable sometimes not worth anything to anyone else.
His old studio table is a solid piece of wood 88 ft long that looks over the water and boasts his colorful chandeliers where clients can see how the colored glass look in regular lighting situations. The table is beautiful but not precious, there are nicks covering it and apparently children fill the table every year to decorate gingerbread.
Chihuly used to also live in the boathouse so there's a beautiful bedroom with a mesmerizing tub that sinks into the floor and the tub is plexiglass with giant gems of colored glass lying beneath encapsulating you. He started out as an interior designer so every detail was designed by him and considered by him, sometimes he apparently comes in and just rearranges things. So love him and his style or not it was still fun to walk through a space like this.
We ended the tour by checking out his lap pool, in the boathouse!, that he still swims in everyday. The bottom of the pool has a display of blown glass pieces too, of course.
It was fun to run out of the office for a bit and hang out in artist's studio space. Inspiring and very hard to go back to my desk knowing my task for that day was wall protection :)
