Photography by Carmen Troesser
Preston Art Glass
St. Louis enjoys an abundance of beautiful vintage stained glass in buildings private and public, residential and religious, as well as a long history of craftspeople schooled in creating and restoring it.
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
work by Emil Frei & Associates
One of the most revered practitioners of the stained glass arts was Emil Frei, whose South Broadway studio, which opened in 1898, turned out and maintained now-historic windows all over St. Louis, many in religious institutions. Emil Frei & Associates remains in operation to this day.
A more recently established example is Preston Art Glass, founded in 1995 by Dale Preston, who passed away last year. Dale’s son Jacob Preston joined the company in 2004. The studio builds both church and residential windows, but restoration—repairing and maintaining pieces inside people’s homes—is its primary area of business.
Any avid scroller of local real estate listings will have seen endless examples of stained glass in the city’s flats and bungalows, many of these functional art pieces having hung for a century or more. They may be lovely to look at, but they come with their share of complications: Glass warps and homes shift with time; inevitably a kid will throw a baseball in the wrong direction.
“We can encounter anything from a very simple repair, maybe replacing one or two pieces on site, to the other end of the spectrum, which is taking apart the stained glass window and rebuilding it, replacing all the broken pieces of glass, and making it look like it did when it was originally made,” says Preston. The goal, he adds, is always to find the closest match for a broken piece of glass, requiring the craftsperson to match colors created 70 to 140 years ago.
Photography by Carmen Troesser
Preston Art Glass
Compton Heights resident John Mason lives in a house built by the famed architectural firm of Barnett, Haynes & Barnett, recognized for its design of the Cathedral Basilica. The home features several stained glass windows, one of which is approximately 10 feet tall and 8 feet wide. Mason hired Preston to restore the 130-year-old window, which wasn’t damaged but had simply deteriorated over time.
“The lead in the windows gets soft over the decades, and [the panes] get wavy and weak and then end up cracking,” says Mason.
Maintaining the historic glass isn’t cheap. Mason says he’s spent close to $5,000 to restore the window in his home. Preston says costs vary, depending on the size of the window and the nature of the repair. For around $150, he can fix a couple of broken panes in one window, but the cost of restoring a window in significant disrepair could balloon to around $2,000.
As a means of avoiding more costly repairs, Preston says, homeowners should watch for cracked panes, bowing or sagging of lead, and rattling. If the goal is to be energy-efficient, Preston recommends adding a storm window and leaving the stained glass inside. But the long-term savings of an energy-efficient pane can’t compare to the aesthetic and historical value of a stained glass window. His advice? “Preserve them.”
Mason echoes the sentiment.
“I’ve been in a lot of houses where, for one reason or another, the stained glass windows have been removed. When I see a home that’s missing its stained glass, I think, Oh gosh, part of its soul is gone.”
