The craftsmen at Sunrise Stained Glass in London, Ont., have made the difficult decision to close shop after years of making and restoring coloured glass across Ontario.
For nearly half a century, the Wharncliffe Road shop has been a place where the ancient art has been taught to hundreds of students interested in stained glass, and where the most delicate window panels have found new life.
But now, a ‘for sale’ sign stands outside the business as the owner makes plans to close at the end of the month.
While stained glass started as a simple hobby for Roger Chapman, who opened the store in 1979, he went on to design and craft windows at private residences and completed major restoration projects for hundreds of churches from Windsor to Kingston to Sudbury.
“I’ve loved it,” he said, calling the process of rebuilding a window that is falling apart is “rewarding.”
Londoners may recognize some of Chapman’s local work. Since the late 1980s, Sunrise has restored nearly every window in St. Peter’s Cathedral Basilica in London, he said, including the three rose windows, as well as most of the windows at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church.
Sunrise took part in the restoration of the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate in Guelph, Ont., the shop’s largest project to date with over 550 stained glass panels, which won an award of excellence from the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals.
Chapman and his partners’ other restoration works across Ontario has included windows at St. Mary’s Pro Cathedral in Hamilton, the Central Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, as well as both Queen’s University and the Royal Military College in Kingston.
The shop has also provided the stained glass hobbyist community with all their supplies and even offered classes for beginners, running continuously since the shop opened, Chapman said.
Chapman and his two partners felt they had gotten too old to keep going with the business, he explained, and the shop is set to close around the end of December.
From wicker to stained glass
The first item Chapman ever crafted out of stained glass was an ashtray he made for his wife, he recalled. He still has it, he added, joking that his first attempt “haunts” him to this day.
His love of stained glass began while he was running his old wicker store in the 1970s. A stained glass artist worked above his shop, he said, until one day the man disappeared, leaving behind all of his materials.
“I thought, well, that looked easy from what I’ve watched,” he said. “So, I read a book and I used his tools and I started making things myself. And that was the start of it.”
It quickly became a bigger part of his life than the retail sale of wicker furniture and seemed like a more interesting direction to take, he explained.
He brought two new partners on board, one who had extensive experience restoring church windows and the other with a talent for painting, he said, helping the shop broaden into the restoration work they went on to complete across the province.
Why is stained glass so common in London?
London is a lucky place to be for a stained glass enthusiast, said Chapman.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a company in London called Hobbs Manufacturing — “the Home Depot of their times,” he said — supplied everything needed to build a home including a stained glass studio where people could pick out windows.
“That’s why, if you walk around London now, you see a lot of stained glass in the residential houses,” he said. “Because it was so easy to add that bit when you were building a house.”
Many of those windows were replaced with clear glass in the mid 1900s as they reached the end of their lifespan, he said, but Sunrise has gotten many requests over the years from the owners of these old homes for new stained glass, as restoring houses to their original style becomes more popular, he said.
As more works of stained glass reach the point of needing restoration work, Chapman is confident that new professionals will emerge who are up to the task, he said.
“There are still a lot of people that are interested in getting into it the same way I did, as a hobby,” he said. “I’m thinking that the restoration part of the business is so interesting and rewarding, I think those people will get into it as well.”
As for Chapman, he hopes to continue crafting stained glass in his spare time, he said, but he will be enjoying his retirement, keeping busy as he tends to his horses on his farm outside Goderich.
