Leadlights feature in many villas and bungalows throughout New Zealand. The more affluent property owners at the time of construction featured elaborate leadlights throughout their houses, while the workers cottages were generally glazed in coloured and textured glass.
Villas usually contained brightly coloured leadlights using geometric patterns or Art Nouveau style organic shapes using stylised flowers and curves.
Bungalow leadlights on the other hand generally were made from many different clear textures and bevel edges and had very little colour, if any at all. Straight lines were all the go, using Art Deco patterns of chevrons, stripes, circles and zigzags. Heavy influence during the 1920s from the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture resulted in many simple patterns of diamond lattice and elongated diamonds.
Transitional leadlights were a mixture of both the villa and the bungalow style.
Restoration of window and door glass in New Zealand has greatly improved since the mid 1980s by the introduction of coloured and textured glasses that are very similar to the original colours and textures, and are often identical.
The glass available today is mainly manufactured in the USA, Germany, France and England as it did a century ago. China also is now producing glass that is suitable for restoration work. New Zealand stopped making sheet glass in 1983 when the Whangarei Glassworks closed down.
Most of the glass used in restoration today of public buildings, churches, villas, bungalows, etc.,is made by rolling or pressing molten glass on plates to give a particular texture. Some of the original plates used over a century ago are still being used today.
English Muffle, a glass very popular from the 1890s to the 1920s, has recently been rediscovered by an Australian enthusiast who tracked down the original plates in England. He then took them to the US where he convinced the Wissmach Glass Co., who had been operating since the nineteenth century, to manufacture the glass in the same colours that they were originally produced.
A large percentage of NZ villas had English Muffle glass either glazed as whole pieces or incorporated in leadlights as features in front doors, surrounds and fanlights.
Most of these early glasses came with creases, bubbles, variations in thickness and colour, and all manner of characteristic faults. Regrettably modern technology has removed many of these delightful foibles. Besides early glass being rolled or pressed on plates, some glass was blown. The ruby red and cobalt blue seen in hallway doors is often blown glass. The stained glass windows in most churches is of blown glass.
Check out the Sauvarins glass galleries for examples of our work creating and restoring original leadlights.
