Artist Dale Chihuly’s Stunning Seattle Studio

You may think you know all there is to know about Dale Chihuly, master of glass, whose delicate handblown creations take the medium to the realm of fine art.

But stepping inside the Boathouse, the former Seattle boatbuilding workshop on Lake Union that has served as the headquarters of his artistic production since 1989, reveals a museum-like space that celebrates not only Chihuly’s curvaceous, colorful glass forms, but the artist’s many decades of collecting both art and antiques. 

And while you can’t visit, you can get a taste of the space in a new book, The Boathouse: The Artist’s Studio of Dale Chihuly, from the University of Washington Press.  From the street, the Boathouse is a nondescript 25,000-square-foot box with gray corrugated metal siding. 

Inside, Chihuly has filled every nook and cranny of the space with a cornucopia of visual delights, from an 85-foot-long banquet table made from a single slab of a 500-year-old Douglas fir set beneath his signature Murano-inspired glass chandeliers to the floor-to-ceiling shelving in the downstairs bathrooms that display the covers of vintage children’s books like The Hardy Boys.

Something of a collector of collections, Chihuly has—in one room alone—antique cast-iron dog doorstops, Edward S. Curtis photogravure portraits of Native American women, some 300 Pendleton blankets, and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with Native American baskets, as well as glass forms by the artist that they’ve inspired. 

And that’s just a few of the untold treasures that await around every corner.     READ MORE...