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Homes

Front Porch: Artist soaring on wings of glass

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published April 22, 2005

Reggie Holder makes a city reflect.

In swirls of beveled glass designs that his hand draws and a diamond wheel cuts.

His beveled and stained glass doors and windows carry his signature palm fronds, herons and sumac leaves he once admired in the design of Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, Ill.

Others glow with sunflowers, abstractions or his masterfully carved jewels that reflect two colors in the light

The rich and famous love him.

So do ordinary folk.

What makes him different is that in an era when bevels for doors and windows are typically made in China and ordered from catalogs, Holder still does it by hand.

"Hand beveling glass is a lost art," he explains. "There's nowhere you can go to learn it. There aren't any of us left around here. Just me and my dad."

A third generation beveled-glass craftsman, Holder learned the trade at 12 from his grandfather, Horace Holder, who began making beveled glass 60 years ago. The young Holder, 37, now runs his own business, the Beveled Edge at 5202 S MacDill Ave., near Gandy Boulevard.

His workshop, a maze of dusty workrooms in a grit-colored brick building, sits between a sports bar and a pool and patio business. Inside, Metallica plays on the radio. Two pet iguanas - belonging to Holder's 13-year-old son, Brandon - observe the daily goings-on from a big cage.

Holder works alone in a 10-foot by 20-foot beveling room, a cramped, no-nonsense space, where every surface is coated in a thin film of glass dust.

He bevels the glass underwater on nickel wheels plated with diamonds - a labor-intensive eight-step process "that's very hard on my hands and joints," he explains.

Being the local gatekeeper to a dying art has provided well for his wife and family, but he doesn't want his son doing it, partly because the work's physically taxing, partly because of the punishing hours.

Other than the few days he took off last year after installing a window in a mountain house in North Carolina, the business rarely allows for vacation.

"I didn't go to college, but my son will," Holder says. "I've already got his tuition paid."

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Brandon does his homework in the office while two full-time employees, Nick Turner, 24, and Jessica Sullivan, 22, help piece together a copper-foil job of grapes, a technique used by Louis Comfort Tiffany at the turn of the century.

"It's old school, a painstaking process, we're actually crimping the copper," says Turner, who learned glass craftsmanship while a student at Blake High School.

They work from Holder's hand drawn sketches on yellow legal pads.

Patterns are also drawn and numbered in black ink on large panels of paper. On a massive worktable, they cut shapes from sheets of glass, then interlock them with small chips of lead. A blue heron takes shape, its delicate glass wings feathered together piece by piece.

When it's complete, it will be part of a beveled-glass door commissioned by a client.

Holder's handiwork costs anywhere from $1,800 to upward of $50,000, depending on the level of intricacy and the amount of labor.

Holder made the 21 wildly bright windows in the West Tampa Library (depicting paintings by artist Synthia St. James), windows in the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, even the plain-faced doors to the harbormaster's house at the new Marjorie Park marina on Davis Islands.

His work fills Ron and Beverly Bailey's mansion on the tip of Harbour Island. Celebrities, professional athletes and chief executives frequently come calling, as do homeowners who just want an attractive wooden front door with a modest beveled and stained glass panel.

Something that glints in the sunlight and makes them smile.

"It increases the value of a house," Holder says. "A lot of our clients have art in their homes. The doors and windows we make are definitely pieces of art."

[Last modified April 21, 2005, 08:32:04]