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Dale Chihuly likes to do things on a grand scale. Take the Boathouse, his headquarters on the shore of Lake Union in Seattle. For enter-taining he uses a long, narrow room facing the lake, dominated by a spectacular 87ft dining table carved from a single piece of

polished Douglas fir. Windows on one side offer views out over the water, and the opposite wall is decorated with a row of Chihuly’s framed paintings and drawings, with a high shelf above displaying his vast collection of grotesque carnival masks.

But none of this is what you notice first. The room is dominated by the line of eight extravagant chandeliers hanging above the table, each in a different colour of glass and made up of some 130 tentacles and gourd-like shapes that were hand-blown in the workshop at the Boathouse, but look strangely organic as they hang here, glittering in the sunlight.

Chihuly is the world’s foremost glass artist, and even if you don’t know his name, you’ll probably recognise his work. He made the magnificent 30ft chandelier that hangs in the lobby of the V&A museum in London and the glass flame that stood in Park Lane during the Olympic year, and he installed work all over Kew for his Gardens of Glass exhibition in 2005. He has had big outdoor installations all over the world, and his museum and gallery exhibi-tions tend to draw record crowds because his work is accessible and colourful and has an undeniable wow factor.

‘Wow’ is a word I find myself using a lot as I walk around the Boathouse, which Chihuly bought in 1990 and which served for a while as his family

The glassmenagerie

Dale Chihuly elevated glass-blowing to an art form and his show-stopping sculptures cast light and colour

around the world, from the V&A in London to the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Sheryl Garratt ventures into

the heart of his multimillion-dollar empire

Above Dale Chihuly with one of his team in his workshop at the Boathouse on Lake Union, Seattle. Chihuly designs his

sculptures and oversees their construction, but he rarely blows glass since losing an eye in 1976. Left an example of Chihuly’s

Persians series in a ceiling at the Boathouse

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home as well as being his workshop. There is a swimming pool here with another large chan-delier hanging above it and a reef of shell-like glass works shimmering in the water. A smaller room nearby has a wall of tanks featuring unearthly neon-lit glass pieces with large tropi-cal fish swimming around them. (The room was originally created for his son Jackson, now 15, who apparently didn’t like it as a child.) A hall-way has an illuminated clear glass ceiling show-casing more of Chihuly’s sea-form works and the flower-like series he calls Persians – an idea he used to great effect in his biggest work to date, covering 2,100 sq ft of reinforced glass ceiling with 2,000 separate hand-blown glass pieces to create a show-stopping entrance to the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

But most impressive of all is the hot shop where all of his glass is blown. This is highly skilled work, but also very physical: the heat from the furnace is intense, and the lumps of molten glass being handled on the end of the blowing pipes can weigh 40lb or more. It’s more than one man alone can handle, so Chihuly works with a team of up to 12 craftsmen. The team move around each other with quiet effi-ciency, a choreographed dance that is all about helping the gaffer – today, Joey DeCamp, who has worked with Chihuly for nearly 20 years – as he heats and shapes the glass. They hold open the furnace doors when he needs to heat up the glass, and add a lip of different coloured molten glass to the flower-like shape he is creating. Chihuly comes along and can’t help but get involved, thwacking the glass with wooden paddles to add to its curves until finally the loader pulls on a heavy protective suit and care-fully moves the finished piece into the anneal-ing ovens to cool at a controlled temperature.

Some critics are sniffy about his work. It is not a debate Chihuly himself engages in. ‘Is it art or is it craft? I say if it’s good, it’s an art’

Sapphire Neon Tumbleweeds (2013, above) and Cerulean Cobalt Chandelier (2013, below) will be among the work on show at the exhibition Dale Chihuly: Beyond the Object at the Halcyon Gallery in London

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Aged 72, Dale Chihuly is a large, affable man with a fine head of unruly curls and a black patch over one eye that gives him

a rakish, piratical air. (He lost the sight of his left eye in 1976 while on a short research trip to Britain, when he went through the windscreen in a head-on car collision that left his face so badly cut he needed 256 stitches and extensive plastic surgery.) He clearly loves his work, and still comes into the studio at weekends to draw or paint, as well as having regular meetings

with his team in the hot shop, overseeing the forms they produce for his sculptures. The ambition and scale of his work have helped to move an artisan craft into the realms of fine art, and he now heads a series of companies with a multimillion-dollar turnover.

His beginnings, however, were humble. Born in 1941 in Tacoma, 30 miles south of Seattle, he was the younger of two boys. His father was a butcher and union organiser, and they lived in a tough working-class neighbourhood. His

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brother, George, joined the US Navy as a pilot and was killed in a flight-training accident in 1957, when Dale was 15. A year later, their father died of a heart attack. He was 51. This double trauma made Dale very close to his mother, Violet, who died in 2006 at the age of 98, but it also meant he lacked discipline. ‘I ran around with a rough crowd, and none of us were con-cerned with school,’ he explains in his gravelly West Coast drawl. ‘Fortunately, I didn’t get kicked out, and then when I graduated, my mother wanted me to go to college. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to say no to my mother, who didn’t ask for a whole lot.’

He enrolled at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma because it was close to home and – for reasons he still can’t explain – decided to take a weaving course. The same year he redecorated his mother’s basement, giving it a bohemian cof-fee house feel, and enjoyed it so much he trans-ferred to Seattle and majored in interior design. But again he didn’t apply himself, instead join-ing a fraternity and spending more time drink-ing than studying. Eventually he dropped out, choosing instead to spend what little money he had travelling. He spent several months in Europe and the Middle East, and ended up work-ing on a kibbutz in Israel, where he met a man who was to turn his life around. ‘There was a guy that drove me around a lot and went on guard duty at night,’ Chihuly says. ‘He had an Uzi machine gun in his lap the whole time, and I was just enamoured with him. He was like a father figure to me, although he was the same age. It got me thinking about my own life, and I became determined to go back to school and do a good job. Which I did.’

After graduating, he found work as a designer in an architect’s practice but continued weaving, creating tapestries with glass parts designed to hang in windows. ‘I got a little oven in this studio in somebody’s basement, and I started fusing glass and melting it so I could make things that would fit into the tapestry. One night I melted some glass between four bricks, and I took a piece of pipe – not a blowpipe, just a piece of pipe that you’d get at the hardware store – and I gath-ered up some glass and blew a bubble. And from that moment on, I wanted to be a glass-blower.’

There was only one course teaching glass-blowing in the US in the late 1960s, at the University of Wisconsin. In order to pay

for his studies, Chihuly quit his relatively low-paid design job and worked instead as a com-mercial fisherman, part of the fleet that still sails up to Alaska from its base in Seattle. ‘I was on a 62ft wooden boat,’ he recalls. ‘It had no lifeboat – when you’re in the cold water you only have a few minutes to live if you don’t have a survival suit. It was dangerous but I didn’t know any better. They don’t allow them to do that any more. But I made $2,200 within seven months, which was enough to go to graduate school.’

He spent a year in Wisconsin, then another year at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before travelling to Venice on a Fulbright scholar-ship to study glass-blowing methods there. He returned to RISD to set up and run a glass

inspired by the colours and patterns of Navajo blankets for nearly £2,000. ‘That meant a lot to me.’ By 1980 his sales added up to the same amount as his teaching salary, so he felt able to leave RISD and move back to Seattle, where he taught part-time at Pilchuck and made glass-work whenever he could. Even then it took a team of 10 to produce his work, so he would make what he could then sell it via galleries until he could afford to hire help to make more. ‘I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have a studio, so I would work a few weeks here, a few weeks there,’ he says.

Gradually he saved enough to put down a deposit on a small studio, then to hire full-time staff. In 1990 he moved to the Boathouse, and a few years after that he bought further buildings in Seattle and in Tacoma. As his reputation grew, so did that of Pilchuck, which continues to teach some 500 students from all around the world on its renowned summer school. Many choose to stay on afterwards, and as a result the area is now home to hundreds of artists and craftsmen working with glass, a fact celebrated since 2002 by the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, which has a pedestrian walkway – the Bridge of Light – adorned with Chihuly sculptures. His work has become so synonymous with the area that in the 1990s sitcom Frasier, which was set in Seattle, the pretentious psychiatrist Frasier Crane had a Chihuly piece on display beside his fireplace. In 2012 the artist was honoured with a large permanent exhibition, Chihuly Garden and

course, and in 1971 also helped establish the Pilchuck Glass School in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, an hour north of Seattle. Teaching was the only way he could imagine making a living out of blowing glass. ‘There weren’t very many galleries and hardly anybody made a living off their art at that time – just a few people in New York,’ he says.

But slowly his work got noticed. Towards the end of the 1970s the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought three of his cylinders

In the intense heat of the workshop Chihuly’s team move around each other with quiet efficiency, a choreographed dance

Above the hot shop at the Boathouse. The work here is highly skilled and very physical – the artists work with lumps of molten glass weighing up to 40lb. Below Amber Jade Herons (2013)

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Glass, near the foot of the Seattle Space Needle.Some critics are sniffy about Chihuly’s work,

saying there are no big ideas behind it, that it repeats the same motifs and shapes again and again, that it is craft rather than art. It is not a debate Chihuly himself engages in. ‘I don’t even answer that, usually,’ he says. ‘Is it art or is it craft? I say if it’s good, it’s an art. The best of everything is an art.’

What is clear, as I tour the different outposts of his empire, is that Chihuly is big business, and one run with sleek efficiency. As well as organising numerous exhibitions worldwide, he publishes his own coffee table books and catalogues, some of which are so lavish he says they will barely break even – ‘But I like books!’ He also employs a full-time videographer, and produces documentaries on his work that appear regularly on television in the States.

His large installations now sell for millions of dollars – a 43ft-tall piece at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, for instance, cost $4.5 million in 2006 – but there is a price point for everyone, from the T-shirts, cards and Chihuly-brand coffee in the Garden and Glass gift shop to the editions made in his workshop: smaller glassworks produced in series and priced from $3,500 to $10,000 depending on their complexity and how many were made.

Chihuly tells me he did five exhibitions and about 30 major installations last year, and if the Boathouse is where the glass forms are created, his buildings three miles up the road are now the real heart of the operation. Here the pieces are assembled into finished sculptures in three studios, with carpenters on hand to create a to-scale indication of the space where the finished piece will be displayed. Sometimes the studio walls will even be painted so that clients can see how the piece will look in situ.

Chihuly takes pride in customer service, making employees available to unpack and build the works, and clean, alter or move them later. Once, he made a 19ft chandelier that went all the way to the floor around a grand piano in a New York penthouse. ‘Then the guy died, and the sister and his business partner both wanted the chandelier. So we cut it in two, and gave them each a half.’

He seems surprisingly flexible about the fin-ished form his work takes, and tells me a story about installing one of his towers in the White House for the Millennium celebrations. Hillary Clinton walked by, and stopped for a chat. ‘She said, “Dale, do you number the pieces to know where they go?” ’ He chortles. ‘And I said, “Hillary, do I look like the type of guy that would number the pieces?” ’

This month many of his mock-up team will be in London, where they will spend seven days installing a 1,500-piece chandelier

in Harrods, and also putting together a show at the Halcyon Gallery of his greatest hits – a glass ceiling, six spectacular new chandeliers, big additions to his Persian series – alongside new ideas such as neon pieces. The introduction in the catalogue has been written by Sir Paul Smith, who became a friend after Chihuly

chanced upon his Covent Garden shop a couple of years ago. They share a love of collecting and a distrust of 21st-century technology. ‘One of the things I like about him is that he corresponds through the post,’ Chihuly says. ‘And not many people use the post any more. I use it partly because I like postage stamps, and I collect them. Then I use them on my letters.’

Smith’s eclectic collections tend to sit around his office in drifts, there for inspiration and fun. Chihuly’s are put on display in his many build-ings, grouped together often in numbers that are overwhelming. There’s a room in the Boathouse dedicated to some of the thousands of brightly patterned woollen Pendleton blan-kets he owns, for instance, while a strange col-lection of string dispensers hangs on the wall of a hallway. ‘I have so many collections I wouldn’t know where to start,’ he says, laughing, when I ask him to describe his favourites.

As a child he collected toy soldiers and mar-bles. Now he collects everything from cars – ‘I only have four now. I’m trying to keep it down’ – to the plaster of Paris figurines that were once given out as prizes in fairgrounds, with every-thing from vintage radios to 1950s ovens in between. His studio is lined with further eclec-tic collections; others are stored in warehouses. Then there’s the Collections Café, a restaurant affixed to his Gardens and Glass exhibition where the dining tables have been specially made to house different collections under glass panels, and others are displayed on the walls.

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Chihuly’s large installations now sell for millions of dollars; smaller glassworks produced in series are priced from $3,500 to $10,000

Above Chihuly’s Gardens of Glass exhibition at Kew in 2005 attracted 860,000 visitors. Below it took a team of six five days to attach all the glass elements of the Rotunda Chandelier at the V&A in 2001

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