Lisa Murray logged onto Craigslist for the first time looking for a small stained glass window for the master bathroom part of her renovation. As with all things about the remodel of her Los Gatos home, she wasn’t looking for something ordinary. She was looking for something “that makes my heart beat faster.”

Then she saw it, an eight foot angel with golden wings, a long white robe and bursts of cobalt blue. Translucent. Brilliant. Mesmerizing. Once the adornment for a San Francisco mortuary, it was now stored in a Richmond warehouse. Lisa quickly realized it was too big for the bathroom, and, quite frankly, almost too beautiful for it.

Despite its mortuary provenance, “it’s not creepy to me,” Lisa said. “The angel represents a hope of something.”

But where could she put it and could she get it home in one piece? What followed would become a lesson in flexiblity, creativity, and nail-biting drama for Lisa and her husband, Craig Hinkley. The couple, along with their two children and dog Millie are living in the tiny backyard cottage they just restored as well as the newly built garage while undergoing a full renovation of their circa-1940 Los Gatos home. Lookiloos and the Mercury News are chronicling their design decisions and family adventures in the “This Darned House” series.

After 15 years of marriage, Craig has learned to trust the fantastical vision of his artist wife. As usual, however, the vision would come with a price. The new home for the angel would be the south-facing bay window in the great room — and that would not only mean a new design concept for the room, but a major re-engineering of the bay window to hold its weight.
“I’m sure Vinnie can make it all work,” Craig told his wife of their contractor, Vinnie Tran, who had already completed the garage under budget.

But first, could they get the angel home safely?

After renting a U-Haul and wrapping the stained glass in blankets, the precious cargo bumped and lurched in the back of a truck all the way from Richmond to Los Gatos. When Craig rolled up the back door of the truck to inspect it, his heart skipped a beat. The window had dropped out of its wooden frame. But he couldn’t tell whether it landed intact or had shattered.

“Lisa, go inside,” he said. “You don’t want to see this.”

When he peeled back the blankets, he was amazed to see it had survived, thanks to the extra cushioning they had put down first. The window had been mounted in three sections. They stored each under their iron bedframe in the cottage until the house was ready for it.

In the meantime, though, Lisa went back to the drawing board — again. She had already undergone a major redesign when she and Craig realized they wanted less interior square footage and more outdoor living. This couple had lived through the hot buggie summers of North Carolina and the rainy winters of Seattle following Craig’s finance jobs and had spent most of their time inside. Only after living in California for six months did they realize that for nearly every beautiful weekend, another one followed. The first major change was to swap out the formal dining room for a vast outdoor terrace off the great room.

But Lisa had originally designed the great room that opens to the kitchen to have a retro David Hicks style with a geometric circle motif. And that would no longer work with the leaded glass window. So she has ditched the idea of using Kraftmaid kitchen cabinets that had a circular overlay as well as the splashes of hot pink she was planning in the family room furnishings.

Instead, to complement the dramatic angel, she is opening up to a new style, with “a tinge of Gothic.”

And that means tufted, deep blue velvet sofas in the living room, for instance, and finding new seeded glass pendant lamps over the kitchen island she plans to paint herself. She is also reconsidering making her backsplash more linear and adding blue glass inserts.

She’s looking forward to the colored light that will splay across her great room. Now she’s just crossing her fingers that the installation of the giant window will go smoothly.

As Lisa puts it, “the drama is half the fun.”

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