Orange Tree Door

My client, who at the time lived in Rancho Santa Fe, California, was an avid art collector from Chicago and had an expansive collection, so much so that he didn't have room on the walls for much of the art he owned. He had to rotate his paintings, leaving some up and storing others, and then doing the rotation again every so often so he could enjoy his whole collection. 

He commissioned me to create an architectural art piece, a work of art that didn't hang on the wall. So I came up with the idea of doing a fantastic entryway, something he could admire as art and be functional at the same time.

This was one of the more challenging doors I have done in my career. The Indian woman picking oranges is carved completely in the round, on both sides of the glass.( To have such a heavy carving sitting in the middle of glass is not an easy task.) I actually used one of the girls who worked for me as the model. The oranges she is picking are slumped glass, meaning they are also completely in the round on both sides of the door, and I made the molds to simulate an actual orange rind. As you can see the orange tree is also hand-carved wood, surrounded by glass leaves, oranges and sky.

My idea for this door came from the fact that the home was an adobe structure sitting in the middle of an orange-tree orchard. My client originally leaned towards designs of climbing roses or ivy. I came up with the idea of an Indian woman picking oranges and he loved it. When the project was completed, he was so overwhelmed with it's beauty he paid me double the contract price, saying it was so much better than he'd imagined! We went on to do more than a dozen more projects together.