The Tay Hotel commission: from brief to installation

The brief arrived as one sentence: "Something with colour and light for the lobby — three metres, roughly." Eight months later a fused glass screen went up in a Perth hotel, and this is how it got there.

Pinning down a vague brief

Vague briefs are normal and honestly welcome — it means the client is open. We visited the lobby twice, morning and evening, because the space faced west and turned amber after 4pm. Whatever we made had to work in both lights. We came away with a palette pulled from the Tay itself: silver-grey, peat brown, and a cold slate blue, with a seam of copper amber that would catch that evening light.

Design and testing

The screen resolved into eleven vertical panels, each 280mm wide, suggesting the movement of water without illustrating it — no literal waves, no fish. We fired 23 test tiles to settle the colour sequence and the surface: a full fuse would have been too glossy for a lobby full of downlights, so we finished at a lower temperature to keep a soft, rippled texture that scatters reflections instead of mirroring them.

The unglamorous part

Three-metre commissions are mostly logistics. Each panel was fired flat, then slumped for a slight curve, then cold-worked. The steel frame was fabricated by a workshop in Loanhead to our drawings, with the glass seated in silicone channels — no visible fixings. Installation took two days, one of which was almost entirely spent on the first panel. The other ten follow once the first is true.

What we learned

The panel everyone photographs is the amber one, third from the left, which only ignites in the last hour of the day. The client didn't know to ask for that. That's really the job on a big commission: not delivering the brief as written, but noticing the thing the space was already trying to do, and building it in glass.