Neile Cooper's Glass Cabin is a small garden retreat in the woods behind her home in northern New Jersey, built almost entirely from salvaged window frames and lumber and glazed with dozens of her own stained glass panels. Flowers, birds, butterflies, mushrooms and crystals fill the walls and roof, so that every view of the forest outside passes through a piece of her art first.
Seen from the clearing in autumn, the cabin looks like a greenhouse that has wandered into a fairy tale. The pitched glass roof and the old sash windows give away its origins as a collection of reclaimed frames, while the coloured panels below show tall ferns, orange lilies and round mushroom shapes.
Who is Neile Cooper?
Cooper is a stained glass artist and jeweller who has worked with glass for more than twenty years. Her output runs from small pieces such as pendants and boxes up to large window installations, and she teaches regular classes and workshops. Many of the nature motifs in the cabin, from botanical stems to wings and gemstones, also appear in her jewellery, which she has sold online.
The cabin first reached a wide audience in April 2017, when the art and design site Colossal featured it, describing a sanctuary next to her house in the Lake Mohawk area of New Jersey. Her publisher's biography places her in Sparta, the township that contains Lake Mohawk, and says she began building the cabin in 2015. In 2022 she published Kicking Glass: A Creative Guide to Stained Glass Craft, a 176-page how-to book that includes photographs of the cabin.
More images of the Glass Cabin and her newer work are on her Instagram.
Built from reclaimed windows
The clever part of the project is its frame. Instead of building walls and cutting openings for glass, Cooper assembled the structure largely from old window frames, so the walls themselves are windows. Reclaimed sashes are cheap or free, already sized to hold glass, and give the building a patchwork rhythm of different panes and mullions. Each frame then became a canvas for a new panel.
Most of the panels appear to use the copper foil technique popularised by Tiffany Studios, in which each cut piece is edged with thin copper tape and soldered to its neighbours. It allows the fine curves seen in her leaves and petals. Traditional lead came, the H-shaped strips used in church windows, is better suited to bolder, straighter lines.
Inside the cabin, season by season
A winter view of the interior shows how the panels work with the weather. Snow-covered trees fill the clear panes while lilies, ferns and a coloured roof glow in the low light. A simple wooden chair and table and a heap of blankets make it clear that this is a place for sitting and reading, not just a showpiece.
This corner pairs botanical panels, including deep blue irises and red blossoms, with a tall cluster of faceted crystals in purple and turquoise. Crystals and gemstones are a recurring theme in Cooper's work and echo the cut-stone settings of her jewellery. On the right, a plain glazed door lets in the morning sun.
A close-up of one wall panel shows broad green leaves arching over a stem of white, bell-shaped flowers that look like lily of the valley. The black lines are the solder seams that hold every piece together, and the light shifting through the textured glass changes the greens from lime to olive.
Three window bays in snow light: an iris, a red rose on a curling stem and a large crystal formation rising from the bottom of the frame. The low winter sun throws coloured patches across the wide pine floorboards, one of the small pleasures of a glass building.
The gable end holds the cabin's most striking panel: a giant monarch butterfly whose wings span the full width of the triangle. The orange-and-black pattern and the white dots along the wing edges follow the real monarch's markings, a colouring that warns birds the butterfly tastes bitter.
The cabin by night and in the fog
After dark, lamps inside turn the cabin into a lantern and the glass reads from the outside instead of the inside. String lights between the trees lead the way along the path from the house.
Looking straight up shows the ceiling panels: a bird of prey with outspread wings, in the reds and browns of a hawk, surrounded by smaller songbirds and blossoms. Glass overhead is the hardest place to install it, because roof panels have to cope with rain, snow load and heat, which is one reason most stained glass sits in vertical windows.
On a misty day the cabin almost disappears among bare trees and fallen leaves. From a distance it is the old-fashioned window frames, not the colour, that catch the eye.
Ideas to borrow for your own garden building
Few people will glaze a whole cabin, but the project offers some practical lessons for anyone with a shed, porch or greenhouse:
- Start with salvage. Architectural salvage yards and renovation sites are good sources of old sash windows. Check them for rot and for old paint, which may contain lead in older homes.
- One panel is enough. A single stained glass insert in a south- or west-facing window gives the coloured light effect at a fraction of the work.
- Protect the glass. Outdoor panels last longer when set behind or between clear panes, which shield the solder lines from weather.
- Learn safely. Glass cutting and soldering involve sharp edges, heat and fumes, so a local beginner's class is the easiest way to start.
Cooper's cabin works because it treats the forest as part of the picture. The colours frame the trees rather than hide them, and the view changes with every season and hour of the day.
Sources: Photos by Neile Cooper via @neilecooper on Instagram; Colossal, April 2017; Search Press: Kicking Glass by Neile Cooper.
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