By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published September 26, 2003
Call it the house that glass built.
Or the house that glass paid for, quips Lisa Vogt.
For 16 years, the stained-glass artist and her husband, Joe, have offered stained-glass supplies and classes at their Kennedy Boulevard store, Originals in Glass.
Like most people, their lives are a mosaic of hard work and family.
Brilliant dreams are often pushed aside for the more subtle colors of the practical.
Earth tones typically trump tangerine.
But life has a way of changing.
In a few weeks, the Vogts will finally move into their dream house - a four-bedroom, three-bath, 3,100-square-foot home that they designed themselves.
A freestanding studio behind the house will allow Lisa to work at home.
But in a land of over-the-top dream houses, this is no ordinary dream house.
For very different reasons.
Step out of their back yard into 7,000 acres of natural well fields.
The view is achingly beautiful.
"It just goes forever," Lisa says. "It has so much depth."
They purchased the wooded, acre-and-a-half lot in Saddlewood, an equestrian community in Wesley Chapel.
They don't ride horses.
But they have two young daughters and a love of privacy.
And glass.
Gorgeous colored glass that catches the Florida sunlight and transforms it into visual poetry.
Lisa made 30 stained glass windows for the house. The colors warm ordinary transoms, bathroom and bedroom windows, the front door and guest hall. The hues are culled from the arts and crafts movement - deep, tropical jewel tones inspired, in part, by what Lisa must see when she looks out the windows.
One window is decorated with swaying palm fronds. Another pulls in the balmy greens, blues and ambers of a fall morning.
A hummingbird hovers in the rich colors of yet another.
"We are very much into nature," she says, "and we wanted the windows to reflect that."
Their inspiration didn't stop with the windows.
In this dream house, colored glass illuminates the utilitarian.
Lisa has made fused glass sinks - bowls or "vessels" as she calls them - in colors that reflect earth and sky and catch water beneath curved, brushed nickel faucets. One sink, which she displayed during the Labor Day weekend home show in Tampa, rests atop a bow-front bar that she bought at the Bombay Company and then topped with her own mosaic marble design.
She made fused glass tiles and installed them at eye level in every shower. Her fused and "slumped-glass" pendant lights glow blue, green and yellow over the bar.
"I did all this because I could," she explains.
You see, the Vogts spent 18 years in their last house in Lutz. Although they loved the house for many reasons, Lisa never felt the ordinary architecture was quite deserving of her artwork.
Or her heart and soul.
"Now I'm only limited by budget and imagination," she says.
At the shop in South Tampa, students learn to make stained glass during a weekday morning class. The room is hushed, bathed in light and buffered from the pounding of traffic on Kennedy.
Stained-glass windows, lamps, bowls and candleholders - mostly Lisa's creations and all for sale - fill the front windows. A pair of beautiful leaded glass doors commissioned by clients in Avila stand behind the back worktable where Lisa and Joe work side by side.
Every day.
Making stained glass for other people's houses.
Now they're filling their own house with the colors of their dreams.
Dreams that catch the light like glass and become even brighter.
- Originals in Glass is at 4430 W. Kennedy Blvd. Call 286-2851.
