Printed Glass Panels for Lebanese Um Khalil, Amman
Lebanese Um Khalil has fed Jordan since 1977, when Antoinette Rami left the Lebanese civil war behind and started cooking in Jerash. Four decades later her family opened a second dining room in Jabal Amman.
That room wanted the coloured glass of an old Levantine house above its walls, and a way to put Um Khalil herself in front of the guests. Forty-seven panels were printed in Al Quoz and sent to Amman.
Project snapshot
- Client
- Lebanese Um Khalil
- Location
- Jabal Amman, Jordan
- Material
- Architectural glass
- Printing service
- Glass printing
- Panel count
- 47
- Largest panel
- 2 m by 3 m
- Production
- Direct UV printing on glass, printed in Dubai
The brief
Traditional qamariyya glass is leaded, and leaded glass does not travel. A panel two metres by three is a structural problem before it is a decorative one: heavy, flexible where it should not be, and vulnerable at every joint. This one had to reach Amman intact.
Forty-seven panels also have to match. Colour drift across a hand-cut, hand-leaded run is part of the craft, but in a band that runs continuously around a room, where a guest can see two panels at once, it reads as a mistake.
Our approach
The pattern was printed onto single sheets rather than assembled from cut pieces and lead. The ink cures as it is laid down, so the colour keys onto the glass itself, and what arrives on site is one piece with nothing to lift at an edge and no joint to fail.
A continuous band is a registration problem more than a printing one. A leading line that runs off the right edge of one panel has to arrive at the left edge of the next at the same height, the same angle and the same width. Forty-seven panels give forty-six chances for that line to step.
Production detail
The two families of panel are read by different light. The coloured band sits above the glazing with a garden behind it, so it is seen partly by light coming through. The heritage panels sit against cream limestone and are read entirely by light bouncing off them, some of it from an uplighter a few centimetres away. The same file printed the same way would not work in both places.
The portraits are the harder print of the two. Flat decorative colour forgives a great deal; a face enlarged to wall size does not, and skin that goes cold or blocks up in the shadows is obvious from across a room.
The result
Forty-seven panels, the largest two metres by three. A continuous band of coloured glass above the walls of one of Amman’s best-regarded Lebanese dining rooms, an arched sign over the door, and the founder’s face on the stone where guests can read her story while they wait.
Have glass to print?
Send the panel schedule: sizes, thickness, quantity and the artwork. We print for projects outside the UAE as well, crated and shipped.
