Project · Zest, Ubud

Guardians in Light

A backlit stained glass panel set into the ceiling at Zest Ubud — two winged guardians in amber and turquoise, the first of three in the suite.

The commission

Zest Ubud sits in Bali's cultural heart, among rice terraces and jungle canopy, and its interior has never been shy. When the space called for something overhead — not a window, but a ceiling that would give light back instead of merely receiving it — we were asked to design and build a suite of stained glass panels set directly into the structure above the room.

This is the first of three. Each panel carries its own motif and its own colour family, so the ceiling changes character as you move beneath it rather than repeating one image three times over.

The panel

The panel measures between two and three metres and is mounted overhead, lit from behind, so the glass reads as a luminous plane against dark timber. Two winged figures face one another in mirror symmetry, crowned and composed, their bodies resolving into long sweeping wings and coiling tails that fill the composition edge to edge.

The figures draw on an old and widely travelled visual language — the guardian sphinx of Egypt and the ancient Near East — filtered through the sinuous line and flattened decorative logic of Art Nouveau. Between them rises a vertical standard in black, white and clear glass: a stylised staff that holds the mirror axis and gives the eye somewhere to rest.

Every line in the panel is doing two jobs at once — drawing the image, and holding the glass together.

Colour

The palette is built on contrast, and tuned to the specific colour temperature of the light behind it.

• Amber & goldThe wings and bodies. Worked in graded tones so each register of feathers shifts slightly as it moves outward from the figure.
• Russet & terracottaAt the shoulders and inner wing, giving the figures weight against a bright ground.
• Turquoise & cyanThe field, fractured into an irregular mosaic of small facets. The fragmentation is deliberate — it splits the backlight into hundreds of separate points and keeps a large flat area from going dead. Stylised blossoms in a deeper blue sit within it.
• Magenta & crimsonA single small floral accent at the lower centre. The only hot colour in the panel, placed exactly where the composition needs a full stop.

The leading follows the drawing rather than fighting it. Feathers, tail scrolls and crown registers are all articulated in came, so the structural lines and the decorative lines are the same lines. Detail on the faces, hands and feathering was fired into the glass, so it will not fade.

Working overhead

A ceiling changes almost every decision. The panel is only ever seen from below, at an angle, usually in low ambient light — and it has to sit safely overhead in a humid tropical building for decades.

• Composition built for the upward view. The symmetry and strong central axis let the image resolve immediately, even from a table across the room and well off to one side.
• A reinforced frame sized for the span, carrying the load through the frame rather than through the glass.
• Colour chosen for artificial backlight, not daylight. The turquoise and amber were tested against the actual light used in the ceiling cavity — the same glass reads very differently under tropical sun.
• Materials specified for humidity and salt air, which in Bali is not a detail you get to skip.

The rest of the suite

Two further panels complete the installation at Zest, each with a different motif and palette. [Add a line here about the other two, and link to their project pages once they're published.]

Project details