A stained glass window discovery

I find a clue about the house that sheds new light.

I remember going with Dad to pick up the stained glass window. The artist’s workshop felt like a sacred, holy space. That’s probably because I associated stained glass windows with church, the only place I’d seen them.

Like Geppeto’s Workshop, the artist’s studio was a place of wonder. It was slightly dusty with many shelves. Tools and materials were strewn about. Dad and I approached a big table at the center and the artist pulled back a blanket.

There, a beautiful stained glass window. My eyes grew huge. I was in awe. It took up almost the entire table. It was six feet long.

An up-close shot of the transom window that’s still above the entryway.

The crescent-shaped window was an orangey amber. At its center, the numbers I knew so well. 110. Our address. Around the numbers were blue flowers.

Dad explained the window would go above our front entrance. It was called a “transom window.” We drove home with our precious cargo wrapped in a thick moving blanket in the back of our mini-van. Dad drove verrrrrry slowly.

My Dad and sister on the front steps as the entryway’s restoration nears completion. This was the summer of 1993.

The original transom was plain clear glass. It broke when Mom and Dad were restoring the entryway.¹ They commissioned a stained glass window to replace it.

To prep for the window’s installation, Mom stripped decades of old paint from the frame. The whir of the heat gun was a constant in my childhood.

I’ve always loved that window. I loved what it symbolized. As cheesy as it sounds, the window feels like the Mikel family crest.

It represents the vision my parents had. They wanted our house to look and feel as new as the day it was built in 1871. The Victorian-style transom window was a sliver of achieving that vision.

It would stay with the house long after we left. The window is still there today — 30 years later. You can see it from the street.

Listing photo from when the house recently sold in 2022. On a sunny day, the amber transom window casts a soft glow on the entryway.

The clue that shed more light

I’d long wondered about the artist. Who were they? How did they arrive at the window’s design?

Then, a clue. I’d recently received a yellowing stack of letters spanning our family’s earlier years in the house. In a 1993 letter Dad sent to the village of Riverside, he mentioned he commissioned Colorsmith Studios for the window.

I googled the studio. They were still around. I sent a note to the email listed on their website inquiring if anyone there remembered the project. The owner replied. Yes, his partner at the time did the Akenside window. He put us in touch.

Paul Damkoehler now has his own studio, Altamira Art Glass in Oak Park, Illinois. He remembered the project all right. Quite a bit about it actually. And — get this — he still had his original sketch. (!!!) He’d held onto it for all this time.

“The sketch here shows all the hallmarks of my designing style, including the coffee stains on the page,” stained glass artist Paul Damkoehler told me.

Paul first met my father when Dad, who was a real estate attorney, helped him close on his house. He worked closely with my parents on the design and color selection. Together, they drew inspiration from the home’s elaborate architectural details.

Using amber as the main color gave him the opportunity to incorporate a graduation of color from light to dark, one of his favorite stained glass techniques. He also noted the three main colors (amber-orange, blue-green, and red-violet) form a triadic color harmony.

“In my experience only the very best stained glass windows show smooth gradations of color,” Paul wrote. “I have always made the assertion to clients that here in Chicago, where it's overcast 175 days per year, a little touch of amber gives the viewer a hint of sunshine.”

The closing of his email made me smile. “Every time I drive past the house, I slow down to keep tabs on one of my babies.”

It makes me so content to know how much care and artistry was put into that window.

1. My parents broke the original window by accident because they thought it opened. It didn’t. An honest mistake though, because a lot of transom windows DID open, since their purpose was to improve not only light but also airflow in those pre-air conditioning days.