hospitalitystyle.com

(September 2008) posted on Tue Sep 09, 2008 3:36pm EDT
Alchemy Glass & Light’s glass-fusion process creates bath sinks bearing vivid, one-of-a-kind color patterns.

By Matthew Hall

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During the past dozen years, Steve Weinstock and his team of craftsmen at Los Angeles-based Alchemy Glass & Light (AG&L) have produced roughly 12,000 kaleidoscope-colored glass sinks for commercial and residential installations. But each of those sinks is unique, thanks to the proprietary glass-fusion technique the company uses to create them.

AG&L fabricates its "Art for the Bath" sink line--along with its lighting fixtures, bordered mirrors and countertops--via a heating and annealing process that involves interspersing precious minerals and metals within layers of fused glass that's been heated in a kiln to between 1,200 and 1,450 degrees Fahrenheit. "When the glass is placed in the kiln, and the minerals and metals are placed on the glass, the color and pattern that will result are not yet apparent," explains Weinstock. "Though the placement affects the result, nature ultimately decides the fixture's final apperance, which means that no two are alike."

Not surprisingly, the sinks' price tag reflects their custom character: They cost from $1,300 to $5,000 apiece, with most priced in the mid-$2,000s.

AG&L's latest product line is the Celestial Series of sinks, which features patterns suggesting such outer-space phenomena as shooting stars and meteorite showers. Like many an artistic endeavor, this one started as
a fortuitous mishap.

"I had accidentally broken a piece of glass," says Weinstock, "and in looking at the shards, was inspired to incorporate the different fragments into this new design with heavenly overtones."

In the Q&A that follows, Weinstock touches on how he made the leap from holography to hand-crafted sinks, what inspires him and who shouldn't buy his company's products.

How did you get into this line of work?

Surprisingly enough, I was in electrical engineering before I made art my career. During the late 1980s and early '90s, I created a series of brightly colored, often graphic-based holograms as art pieces. I adapted an existing holographic process and simplified it to a point at which I could produce intense color-mixing and dimensional graphic shadows in space.I would take solid objects and drawings on glass or plastic and place them into the holographic volume, which I then would record as a visual "soup" of light and color.

How did that lead to the formation of AG&L?

I began to incorporate the refractive qualities of glass as objects for my recordings. Glass became more prevalent in my designs and I began using slumped-glass objects [flat, pre-cast glass that's been heated until it slowly flows into a mold] that not only appeared within the holograms, but became an object in which the holograms could be displayed. I started working with other glass artists and eventually shifted my focus to glass design and production. I think some of my current pieces at AG&L capture the dynamic optical qualities and vibrancy found in my earlier holographic work, which brings things full circle, in a way.

What is the origin and significance of your company's name?

The word "alchemy" just seemed to capture the essence of what we do with the glass and the metals and minerals in our products. We take very basic materials that in themselves have little intrinsic value, and transform them into a new material that almost feels like a natural precious element. It's not exactly turning lead into gold, but it's the same idea. The word "glass" reflects the fact that this material is the starting point for just about everything we make, and the word "light" is in there because though we may take it for granted, it's just as important to the experience of the work as any physical material we use.

Describe the studio and workshop where AG&L's products are created.

We just moved to a new space located in the heart of Los Angeles. It's a giant open space with 28-foot-high skylit ceilings and walls of brick and glass, built sometime in the 1920s. It's got great cityscape views, lots of natural light, wood-plank floors and a second floor mezzanine, which I use as my design studio.

On the shop floor itself, we've got five large glass kilns and plenty of glass cold-working equipment-grinders, polishers, sandblasters, etc. We also have a fully functional woodshop and metal shop where we can fabricate just about anything we need, whether it's an experimental mold for a new glass shape or one of our bathroom vanity designs.

How many craftsmen do you work with at your company?

Depending on workload at any given time, it varies from three to eight.

Glass can shatter - should that give pause to anyone considering your company's products?

Our annealing process has been tested and refined over the years to give our products the strength and hardness they need to weather a lifetime of use. The only situation I can think of in which someone should think twice before using a glass sink as opposed to ceramic or porcelain is when there is likelihood of what's called "thermal shock," which is an abrupt change in temperature from one extreme to another. An example would be a bathroom that has an instant hot-water supply installed. Such a system could cause one of our sinks to develop a fracture.

Beyond the new Celestial Series, do you have any other new products in your pipeline?

Yes, but it's a secret pipeline.