Martin Faith, who would soon move to Colorado from Scotland, was sitting in an Aspen coffee shop with his wife Gillian in the summer of 1990 when a stained glass piece for sale caught his eye.
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The price seemed too high given the unremarkable craftsmanship, but it triggered the idea for a business that would become Scottish Stained Glass.
Over the last 35 years, Faith has gone from hawking glass panels that he brought over from Glasgow to crafting customized stained glass windows for thousands of local homes to completing historically significant restoration projects.
Today, his Centennial-based team of 35 employees has restored over 40,000 stained glass windows in churches and buildings across the country.
Places where Colorado residents might run across the company’s handiwork are the Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, the Deer Creek Church in Littleton, the Boulder Theater’s stained glass facade, and Temple Emanuel in Denver. The company also restored windows for the historic Vernon AME Church, one of the few structures to survive the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tragedy, Scottish Stained Glass donated a custom, three-story “Legacy” window remembering past pastors and church members who survived the massacre.
And this year, Faith, 64, received his own monumental recognition. In May, the U.S. Small Business Administration named him Colorado’s Small Business Person of the Year.
“It’s more than just a business. I mean, you have to stay in business, but it’s just something else. It’s the reason I’m not retired,” Faith said of his long love affair with stained glass, which began when he was a small boy staring up at the colorful windows in church.
In college, Martin was studying for his real estate license when he was recruited into the replacement vinyl window business. While they were an energy-efficient improvement over older and draftier windows, many historic homes in Glasgow contained beautiful, artistic panels of stained glass.
As those older windows were ripped out, a piece of the city’s cultural history started disappearing.
Rather than tossing out the panels as many people did, Faith stored hundreds of them in a warehouse, not knowing what to do with them — until the idea came to him in that coffee shop.
If a mediocre piece of stained glass could command so much in Colorado, what might a genuine work of stained glass art be worth?
He began shipping century-old pieces of Glasgow Style windows, marked by a minimalist, linear approach that allows natural light to flood through, to a hungry market in Colorado.
Scottish Stained Glass is part of the larger Scottish Group Companies, which installs windows, doors, siding and decks and has a division that distributes and installs a wide array of window films and tints.
That work paid the bills, but home improvement work is not the kind that wins SBA attention.
Stained glass is where the company now sets itself apart and where Faith expects most future growth to happen.
“Stained glass, just in the last couple of years, has grown to become the biggest division,” he said.
Faith plans to offer lessons to the public on stained glass work. He is assembling an in-house gallery that will contain traditional pieces salvaged from churches in Scotland as well as modern designs.
Pushing the medium forward
Under the direction of conservator and master glass painter Maria Valentina Sheets, the studio is also pushing the boundaries of the art form.
Sheets has become known for her hand-painted, kiln-fired stained glasswork and a technique called Vitreonics that creates realistic images.
Faith will turn to her when he has a creative vision.
One of those collaborations resulted in a David Bowie polyptych capturing the four phases of Bowie. It greets visitors in vivid colors as they enter the showroom’s lobby in Centennial.
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Sheets has also translated a painting from iconic feminist artist Judy Chicago into glass and is working on vitrifying other works created in different mediums.
Programmable LED backlighting behind custom glass pieces is driving a wave of renewed interest and modern creativity, Faith said.
Out of a dark period, a bright future
The pandemic in 2020 forced the company, which had focused mostly on local work, to rethink its business model.
A boosted online presence and Zoom consultations allowed sales reps to safely interact with customers and to expand their market.
The company quickly found itself pursuing and winning major commissions around the country.
“So I thought, okay, so when this thing is over, we should be able to see Colorado come back again. But why don’t we just try to become a national company?” Martin recalls.
That expansion, however, required more physical space and capital, so Faith turned to the SBA for funding.
An SBA loan helped the company, which was renting an 8,000-square-foot building, purchase a much larger 25,000-square-foot building that once housed a mortgage brokerage.
Weeping windows
Staff at the Mother Cabrini Shrine were shocked when, a year ago, they entered the chapel and found water cascading from a stained-glass window.
The building had recently undergone a major renovation and expansion, but nobody thought to restore the windows, which at 55 were still young in stained glass years, said JoAnn Seaman, executive director of the shrine on Lookout Mountain.
But decades of harsh Colorado foothills weather had taken their toll, creating the conditions for a structural collapse of the four windows.
“I knew immediately that we could trust them, that they understood the significance of the windows and how they were part of the fabric of this place,” Seaman said.
In January, workers removed four massive, 700-pound panels from the steep roofline. At the Centennial workshop, other workers delicately removed and cleaned 1,200 pieces of grimy faceted glass by hand.
The restored pieces were then bedded into a newly formulated, highly durable modern matrix designed to last 100 years. And the windows were reinstalled in time for the Easter service.
While the Shrine opted to keep its original glass, the Deer Creek Church in Littleton chose to go with a highly customized design.
Two decades ago, the congregation blocked the east-facing windows because of the intense sunlight streaming through on Sunday mornings, said Aaron Ellis, the church’s worship director.
Hoping to let natural light back in, the church landed on stained glass, but struggled to find a contractor willing to work on the sanctuary’s 30-foot-high frames.
“Scottish Stained Glass was capable of getting that high and installing the windows,” Ellis said.
Sheets embedded the themes of word, water, bread, wine, and prayer into soft, cloud-like abstract forms, providing the church with a style uniquely its own.
“They did a phenomenal job designing windows that let natural light in without blinding our congregation, and the design is beautiful,” Ellis said.
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