Gilroy Stained Glass Ltd

Name: Gilroy Stained Glass Ltd
Address: 230 – 2560 Simpson Road, Richmond, BC, V6X2P9, CA
Telephone: +16048777793

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Richmond, BC
Gilroy Stained Glass Ltd

John & Laura Gilroy AMGP trained in one of England's oldest glass studios. We specialize in traditional and contemporary glass painting at our Vancouver studio.

www.gilroystainedglass.com

04/07/2026

I hope you all had a good Easter and were able to take some time for R&R with loved ones this long weekend.

Speaking of loved ones; a big congratulations to John who has been elected to the Professional membership of the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals! John has been working for over 40 years at the highest end of our medium with extensive experience restoring and conserving stained glass of all ages, including medieval. He is very much looking forward to getting more involved with the BC chapter of CAHP and continuing to help preserve this fascinating art form for future generations of Canadians.

Here he is working on one of our current projects restoring and re-leading the windows of St John’s Shaugnessy.

03/20/2026

When the wall needs to be three times higher and you still need a ladder…

02/10/2026

We haven’t posted in a while as it’s been pretty busy here in our little studio. John has removed three windows from a local church, and is in the process of dismantling and creating new cutlines as part of a long term restoration project.

I’ve been designing a new 120 sqft window for a new church, and with the final draft of the design given the thumbs up, I’m drawing the full sized cartoon initially in pencil and then in Indian ink.

We’ve found that by utilizing fold-up tables and the adjoining bench I can work on areas without separating sections from the cartoon as a whole. The window will have seven figures which all need to run through correctly. It’s not the biggest painted window we’ve done here, that was a near 300 sqft Resurrection window back in 2010, but at times I really feel for the Police Chief Brody character in the film Jaws when he says “we’re going to need a bigger boat”.

With great North facing natural light for the easels and a view of the mountains our studio is a pretty good boat.

09/25/2025

September always feels like new beginnings; residue from all the school years I guess. We love starting new designs and new projects at this time of year, and checking out new opportunities. We attended and did a presentation at the annual meeting of the BC chapter of the Canadian association of Heritage Professionals - what a welcoming group doing a fantastic job! We will definitely be looking at applying to join in the near future.

07/28/2025

Here on the West Coast of Canada you don’t often see medieval glass from England, and from Canterbury Cathedral no less. John worked on the restoration and preservation of Medieval stained and painted glass over the years from his time at James Clarke and Eaton, and also in our own little studio when we were still in England.
We documented the months of careful cleaning and removal of liberal amounts of cement on a previous post, so today we’re very happy to show the finished windows installed into St. John’s Shaughnessy to celebrate their Centenary. The background has been painted to refract the light and recede slightly so that the jewel like quality of the medieval glass (centre section of each panel) is pushed forward. A pattern of strong painted line on hand made mouth blown glass from Germany, France and Poland, somewhat fragmented to match the fragmented pieces of Medieval glass. Plus some silver staining and a little bit of mimicking of Kelp glass in a few areas. John did some Kelp glass repaints decades ago and after some trial and error came up with a way to mimic the very deep almost reddish amber that the stain produces, although this originated in the mid 17th century we thought it gave a “tip of the hat” to glass production in centuries gone by.

06/12/2025

The end of a long term project is always exciting. We recently installed the last part of the Twelve Apostles project for St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Langley, it is so rewarding to see the culmination of all our work and to see the windows as we envisaged. The project in its entirety was 24 windows; the 12 on the east aisle depicted scenes from the Old Testament, and the 12 just completed on the west aisle depicted the Apostles. We have been working with St Joseph’s since 2017 when we created the design for the first stage. However, the project didn’t really get off the ground until 2019 and we’ve been completing windows as benefactors came forward. We will miss Fr. Patrick and all the staff who we have come to know quite well, but I don’t think we will miss that tricky access getting up onto the roof and building a scaffold over the skylights to install the windows!

04/10/2025

Hi everyone, It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything as we have been really busy with the second phase of our Twelve Apostles project for St Joseph’s in Langley. Happily all six windows were commissioned at the beginning of the year and it’s been full on figurative work since then. This is the project that has a difficult roof access plus scaffolding has to be set up over the sky lights, so we are very grateful to St Joseph’s for commissioning these windows concurrently so that all can be installed within the same time frame. I’ve shown a few photos of the creative process here; John and I working on different sections resulting in floating figures and disembodied heads on the easel!

12/23/2024

Wishing you all a merry Christmas, happy holidays and all the best for 2025.

Laura & John
Gilroy Stained Glass

12/12/2024

We recently completed a lovely commission of five leaded windows for Topnotch Woodworking. Their residential client in Vancouver wanted a special bar area (who doesn’t?!) and our panels completed the look of the beautiful cabinets. Although the design seems very simple, fabricating it can be tricky, but the most tricky thing when working with clear non textured glass and bevels is making sure there are no scratches anywhere! We find that a successful project is in large part dependant on who is project managing, and Fred was a pleasure to work with.

“The combination of your work and ours made our customer so happy. Thanks again for your excellent work; see you for the next project!”
Faramarz (Fred) Farrokhi
Topnotch Woodworking Ltd

11/28/2024

We are excited to have started a very unusual project - we are restoring and repurposing some panels made up of fragments of medieval stained glass which were originally from Canterbury Cathedral. This is pretty extraordinary for Vancouver; it’s fair to say that we don’t have a lot of medieval glass here! The oldest stained glass that John restored in the UK was 13th century, and he had English Heritage watching over his shoulder. This type of window where fragments of stained glass from multiple windows were put together in a new window, was referred to within the studio where we apprenticed as a “fruit salad”. Perhaps not a very respectful term for such historic glass.

In this case the church has had these panels in the basement for many years. The medieval glass requires careful and gentle cleaning with distilled water and cotton wool, and we need to remove the textured machine made glass that makes up the rest of the panel. We will then incorporate the medieval sections within two new windows, creating additional areas with mouth blown glass and painting techniques that will combine historic with contemporary in an harmonious design that will commemorate the Centenary of St John’s Shaughnessy.

10/24/2024

Working to commission means that we get some very unique creative briefs! For this I thought I would feature these two narrow windows we created for a client whose home was once a Victorian school house. It was interesting to research and to design in such a way as to give the windows a contemporary feel while celebrating the past. Pretty sure that some of the children are just waiting for the home bell to ring - the more things change, the more they stay the same….

Address

230 – 2560 Simpson Road
Richmond, BC
V6X2P9

Telephone

+16048777793

Website

http://www.gilroystainedglass.com/

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