Legacy/Portfolio
Portfolio
From Australian native studies to Art Deco Style Moderne, the studio moves between periods with the same painterly eye — historical fluency, made for the room it hangs in rather than copied.
Gum, angophora, horizon
Windows aiming to encapsulate the movement and colour of angophoras, and to tell the story of a person looking out through the branches to the horizon.
“When the light hits the white glass the glass shines gold” — a realistic effect of looking at these Australian trees. One set lives in a Wentworth Falls home surrounded by them.
Borders & jewels
The leadlight of Sydney's Victorian terraces and villas — hallway sidelights, front-door panels and highlight windows worked in strict symmetry. A central motif inside a running border, with acid-etched ruby, flashed colours and faceted glass jewels catching the light in the corners.
Most Victorian work through the studio is restoration: re-leading panels that have bowed or lost their cement, and replacing cracked quarries and missing jewels with matched antique glass. New panels are drawn in the same grammar of border, corner and centre for terraces being taken back to their period.
Bauhaus, no borders
“What I am after above all is Expressionism” — Matisse. A mix of German Bauhaus, the lines of German cinema, the movement of Futurist painting and the colour of American Abstract Expressionism.
No borders to distract the flow of the composition — a wholeness through perfect asymmetry, fitted to contemporary architecture.
Sunburst fanlights
The sunburst fanlight and geometric door panel of the Federation cottage and California bungalow — rays fanning from a rising half-circle in amber and green, framed by squares of textured cathedral glass. The “sun design” fanlight over the front door is the signature of the period.
The studio restores these where the lead has failed and the timber fanlight sash has dropped, matching the streaky and rippled glass the originals were made with. New sunbursts are drawn to fit a rebuilt or widened opening, and matched to a surviving one next door where there is one.
Squares & triangles
Art Deco “Style Moderne” of the pre-war 1930s — groupings of squares and triangles. Geometrics are a huge part of leadlight, layered here on top of jagged, over-lapped design.
One piece began as a severely broken Art Deco door the studio repaired; another uses a sheet of glass “made by a funny old man in a factory at the turn of the century”.
From the archive
The deeper archive, sorted by style — older phone snaps of finished panels, jobs on the bench and windows going back into houses, plus a few of Kirby at work. Not portfolio shots, but the record of a hand that has been at this a long time.
Enquiries
Tell us which of these styles speaks to you and where the window lives — we'll design from your light, not from a catalogue.