When this house was newly built and we moved into it in 1991, it was an open concept house. A new design, we were informed, that was brought back from Florida to see if it could find buyer-traction in Ottawa at the time. The house was built as a sample to be kept in inventory to determine buyer-interest. It did evoke plenty of interest but no offers to buy. So the priced was dropped by $20,000 and around that time we came along looking for wallspace and a house different than what we had been accustomed to in the previous house where we had spent 20 years raising our children to adulthood.

As soon as we moved into the house my husband assessed how he might go about transforming the house partially from its open-concept to a more traditional, closed-concept home. And he started with the kitchen and adjoining breakfast room, both partially open through sightlines in the kitchen and access in the breakfast room, to the great room beyond, a two-story affair with ample walls of a suitable height to please my husband's aesthetic.

The opening between the kitchen and the great room, an unglazed 'window' situated over the kitchen sinks, soon was filled with stained glass and one could no longer look from one room to the other. And the wide open space inviting one from the breakfast room into the great room was closed off with a line of six glazed doors. And for the next 25 years this is what we enjoyed living with.

Suddenly my husband ventured the opinion yesterday that he thought he might remove the stained glass windows between the great room and the kitchen. He would either, he said, replace the windows with others he would design and piece together because he was tired of looking at the woodland landscape that the current windows represented, or he would leave the opening blank. Once the windows were removed we both agreed that we liked the open effect, and we would leave it that way.

Looking into the kitchen from the great room we can see the stained glass he had designed and installed above the banks of kitchen cupboards and around the central light fixture, so there's no loss of stained glass whatever. And looking into the great room from the kitchen we can now see the stained glass windows looking out over that room onto the backyard. So, no visual loss of brightness whatever; a gain, in fact. 

Strange, isn't it just!

Now he's planning to remove the sectioned mouldings and to install other mouldings along with side pillars to match other areas in the kitchen he has worked on before. This is born another project.