Lumière Atelier — Bespoke Stained Glass, Lyon

The Studio

Forty years
of luminous craft

In a converted silk workshop on the slope of fourvière, where the saône catches fire each september, bastien moreau opened a studio with nothing but a master glazier's knife, a furnace stolen from a demolished foundry, and an obsession: to make stained glass that does not merely cover a window, but transforms the very architecture of light.

Today, Lumière Atelier is a collective of twelve artisans — glass cutters, kiln painters, lead workers, and structural engineers who treat the medieval tradition not as relic but as living language. Each piece begins hours in the studio, the most unglamorous of those hours spent selecting individual sheets of rflush ruby, bohemian ruby red, or czech aquamarine from the handful of remaining European factories that still know how to blow glass by hand.

Our commissions range from private chapels to museum atriums, from the restoration of war-damaged rose windows to the creation of entirely new glazing programs for architects who understand that glass is the only material that builds in absence — a wall made of nothing but light.

140+

Commissions

Years

Artisans

Commission Process

From silence
to spectrum

Every commission begins with a conversation — rarely about glass. We listen to how light moves through your space at different hours of the day, what memories are attached to that architecture, what the building was meant to make you feel. The glass follows from that listening.

Consultation & Light Study

We visit your site at dawn, noon, and dusk — three visits, three different conversations about the same space. We photograph the light. We map the seasonal path of the sun. We take measurements to the millimeter and notes to the heart.

Typically 2–3 site visits over a three-week period

II.

Design & Full-Scale Cartoon

Our design team — always working by hand — produces a full-scale cartoon on the studio floor. This is the traditional method: the drawing that is the size of the window itself. Every color is tried. Every sheet of glass is held up to the light. The design lives and changes on the floor until it finds its own truth.

8–12 weeks of iterative design, including three client review stages

III.

Cutting, Painting & Firing

The glass is cut by hand — never by machine — using a three-hundred-year-old technique of scoring and breaking that preserves the natural tension of the sheet. Surface painting is executed in the old manner: iron oxide ground in gum arabic, fired in our vertical kilns at 780 degrees. A single window requires forty to sixty firings, each one a small act of faith.

The most time-intensive phase. 12–20 weeks depending on complexity

IV.

Leadwork & Armature

Each piece is outlined in h-shaped lead came, the joints soldered with a tin-phosphorus alloy that will not corrode. Behind the glass, a structural armature of hand-forged steel and bronze carries the weight. The glass is never structural — never asked to hold up what it was never meant to hold.

Every armature designed for a minimum 200-year service life

Installation & Commissioning

Our installation team — who have hung glass on cathedrals in Alsace, private libraries in London, and museum facades in Tokyo — works in silence. The glass arrives in custom crates lined with unbleached cotton. It is fitted, checked, and sealed. Then the scaffolding comes down. Then the light does the rest.

Installation typically 2–4 weeks. Full commissioning over 6 months as seasons turn

Selected Works

A body of light

2023

The Chapel of the Unnamed

Saint-Maurice, Haute-Savoie

A glazing program for a rebuilt rural chapel, composed entirely of hand-blown glass in eighty-seven distinct shades of blue — from the palest copenhague to the deepest bohemian sapphire — arranged to shift with the hours, so that by vespers the interior exists in a light indistinguishable from the color of prayer.

12 panels Hand-blown crown glass Bronze armature

2022

Fracture & Bloom

Musée d'Art Contemporain, Lyon

A double-skin curtain wall separating the museum's main atrium from the new sculpture garden. The inner layer is fractured cobalt; the outer, warm amber. Between them, a three-centimetre air gap where dust and insects and rain create an ever-shifting third layer — a living glaze the size of a building.

48m² Double-skin system Structural silicone

2021

Response in Vermilion

Holocaust Memorial Library, Strasbourg

Commissioned by Survivors of the Shoah Voice Foundation, this window responds to a single testimony — a woman's account of walking past the painted shutters of a neighbour's house one spring morning in 1944, noting only that the shutters were closed, and would not be opened again. The glass is rendered in the exact vermilion the woman describes.

Single panel, 6m tall Kiln-painted ruby glass Steel armature

2020

The Tide Room

Private Residence, Étretat

A circular dining room on the fifth floor of a clifftown residence, entirely glazed in a spiral of approximately four thousand individual glass tesserae — each the colour and translucency of sea-glass collected from a single beach on the normandy coast. At night, the interior becomes a submerged world.

~4,000 tesserae Sea-glass patina technique Circular geometry

2019

Canticle of the Northern Light

Concert Hall Extension, Lille

A 14-metre nave window for a concert hall's new recital space, composed of hand-blown opal glass panels that reproduce, in colour and texture, the aurora borealis as seen from the northern tip of the réunion island — where the artist grew up. The effect is not representation but translation: light translated into light.

14m × 4m Hand-blown opal glass Reinforced concrete substructure

2018

The Garden of Faded Things

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

A series of six rose windows for the entrance pavilion of the botanical garden, each depicting a botanical motif not through representation but through the inherent morphology of the glass itself — the seed-pod form of bohemian ruby, the fractured translucency of chevron glass, the pooling depth of czech emerald. Nature, refracted.

6 rose windows Mixed European glass Traditional lead came

LumièreAtelier

Forty yearsof luminous craft

From silenceto spectrum