Levitation

One of our favorite features in the kitchen we renovated at our old house was the floating glass bar. I saw a photo of something similar, but more modern, in a magazine and thought it would work well in our large island design to break up the large expanse of granite. We had to engineer this ourselves and had iron brackets made along with the custom glass. Here is what that looked like:

In our new kitchen we had a peninsula in the design and it made sense to have a bar there. We liked the floating glass top design so much that we decided to repeat it in the new kitchen. Our contractor, however, couldn't figure out how to do it, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise given their lack of getting things right. So, we had the engineering know-how, having done this before, but in a new area we did not know the resources for the iron and glass work.

We used the Internet to research iron work. Turns out no one in our county does this type of work--hence the complete lack of iron fencing. We wondered why no one did that, figured it was the expense, but no, it was just lack of resources. Our search took us across the river to Westchester county and it turned out that we found a great company that does terrific work and really cares about the quality of the job, Mohegan Metalworks. Here is a look at the custom-fabricated iron posts in the new kitchen:

We knew the design we wanted since we had engineered this bracket before in our old house. No need reinventing the wheel when you have one that works.

This particular bar is a bit longer than the bar was in our old house, so it needed three brackets instead of just two. Also note the cabinet door to the right of the far right bracket. We put our grill tools in there and it works great. Looks like when the glass goes on top it might be hard to get into, but no.

These brackets are trickier to install than it might appear and they had to come back three times before the final installation was perfect, but the beauty of that was that Mohegan insisted on perfection on their own. Normally I'm the one insisting on getting it right, so I was thrilled that our vendor was taking this view proactively without any urging on my part.

Now we need to find glass. While we were picking our our tile in Artistic Tile, our consultant recommended Galaxy Glass in New Jersey. So, we went there to look at options and get samples. They had some beautiful options. One we could not get a sample of, but it was molten glass, where they build a form and pour molten glass in it, like you would concrete. The glass gets bubbles in it and looks like a big block of ice when done. But, the minimum depth on that option was 2", which makes for a really thick countertop. Consider most glass countertops are 3/4" thick. We asked for an estimate anyway, but knew that would be too overwhelming in the space.

Other options looked good and we thought one of these would work well, depending on the price.

This was simple frosted glass.

This one we loved! It has copper screen sandwiched in between two pieces of clear glass. Cool! Next to it is smoked crackle glass, but we thought that one was too dark.

Then, we got the estimates. Holy cow! Molten glass was $10,000, so good thing we knew we didn't really want that one. Other two pieces were each about $5,000. So much for the cool copper screen. No way we are even considering paying $5,000 for a piece of glass that is only about 4' long.

So, we went to the place we got our shower doors done to see if they had anything interesting. Everyone makes the simple frosted, so we found that, but they did have others.

This one had a pebble effect and it could have worked.

Prices were still high, but half of what Galaxy was quoting. Still, more than we wanted to spend and more that we did spend when we did our old house only a little over 3 years earlier. So, that gave us an idea. What if we went back to the place we got our glass in Memphis? What we needed was simple and we could provide all the measurements. It could be shipped here. Only drawback is that we'd have to install ourselves.

So, we called Glassical. They couldn't provide the copper screened version, but they could do the frosted glass and could have done any of the other pebble or cracked glass versions. And, unbelievable, even shipped their price was half of the last vendor, so 25% of the original Galaxy quotes.

We opted for the frosted glass under the principle of less is more. There was enough going on in the kitchen already and simple felt right. Since this was long distance, we did have to provide a detailed scale drawing and accurately mark the locations for the stainless steel mounting discs underneath. While it is possible to just put felt or rubber spacers on the brackets, we wanted it to be secure and that requires screws. So, we were a little nervous and measured and remeasured about a dozen times before we finalized the drawing and hit the send button on the email.

Here is how it turned out:

As we learned at our last house, no more than two people will ever sit at a bar, so we designed it to fit two stools. We also got two cool pendant lights that are over the bar that line up with the two can lights that are over the prep sink area.

This is the view I have when I'm prepping food. Guest can sit at the bar with drinks and snacks and we can chat.

Here you can see how the bar floats above the counter top.

So, that was the last element in the kitchen. Next post will be the final reveal!