ON SOCIAL MEDIA, one of the most shared entries from Milan’s Salone del Mobile in April was a piece called Credenza. The lozenge-shaped cabinet on four skinny legs—designed by Patricia Urquiola and Federico Pepe for Milanese boutique Spazio Pontaccio—stopped the show with its facade of zigzagging primary colors and its striking glow. What gave the cabinet its aura? Its primary material: stained glass.
Stained glass embraces the sublime and the ridiculous. It is the stuff of cathedrals but also casinos and tawdry tourist shops. It can sparkle like jewels and mask hideous views. And with handmade touches of color returning to contemporary interior design, stained glass is gracing windows, furniture and accessories again, but with some modern twists.
In the new collection of small glass-panel wall hangings created for West Elm by Los Angeles design studio Commune, brass-finished metal replaces the lead that traditionally binds stained glass, and contemporary shades of orange, green, cerulean blue and cherry red stand in for brooding hues like garnet, amethyst and sapphire. Deep jewel tones like the latter trigger the material’s Addams Family associations—the "Gothic creepy thing," said Roman Alonso, co-founder of Commune.
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For a family vacation camp in the Bay Area, Commune recently transformed a tiny cabin into a meditation room by filling the windows with glass in soft blue, rose and tan. If you’re installing a stained-glass window, even in a Victorian home, Mr. Alonso said, less intense shades will update the look.
The design itself also can make the difference between transcendent and tacky. In 2014, when Commune installed a pair of blue-and-gold stained-glass windows to partition the restaurant and reception area at the new Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, it used a diamond pattern often found in medieval churches but blew up the scale and turned it on its side. The result synced with the 1927 Spanish Gothic building but was fresh enough to support the hotel’s hipster cred. "It felt right," Mr. Alonso recalled, "and importantly, the historic preservation people liked it."
Emily Henderson also believes in respecting context. "I think stained glass has to reference the architecture and era of the building," said the Los Angeles designer, who turned windows of a local event space into quilts of emerald, aqua, pink and gold glass defined by strips of bronze. "The Fig House was industrial-meets-party-space, so a huge, modern geometric piece worked," she said.
Strict geometry and edgy abstractions are big in the new stained glass. The Credenza collection’s graphics, for instance, catapult the craft into the 21st century. "What you have is sunlight hitting a pyramid," Mr. Pepe said of the cabinet’s face, where colorful spikes bounce off a ziggurat (pictured in slideshow).
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In a more figurative and irreverent take, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone used an almost cartoonish stained-glass panel (pictured above) as a bathroom wall in the 129-year-old Harlem church he converted into his home and studio a few years ago. Among the expanses of restored leaded church glass, Mr. Rondinone’s collaboration with countryman and artist Urs Fischer illustrates a bathroom interior: toilet, sink, shower, crumpled towels and all. Mr. Rondinone admits a fascination with stained glass and appreciates the material’s ability to "put in light." The piece divides the windowless bathroom from the light-soaked living room.
Three-dimensional stained glass pieces can be even more interesting. Kalin Asenov in Savannah, Ga., designs sculptural fixtures of stained glass and polished brass, with light emanating from invisible LEDs at the core. By day the lamp reflects ambient light; at night, it is fired up from within. Mr. Asenov considers these pieces ceiling jewelry, adornment for a part of the home that gets scant attention.
Ironically, houses of worship, once the primary clients for stained-glass artists, are losing their love of the material. Many church leaders consider it old fashioned or prohibitively expensive.
So what accounts for the rise in secular enthusiasts? Designers say it is the same thing that has produced so many knitters, brewers and ceramists: a passion for craft. Coldness is out, whether that means frosty minimalism or the monotonous click of technology.
Mr. Alonso of Commune has one other explanation for a stained-glass revival. "Because of the way the world is going, we need celestial interventions," he said. "And maybe a stained-glass window provides a bit of that."
