The Home Above Artistic Glass

Artistic Glass owner and master stained-glass craftsman Josef Aigner grew up in his native Germany in an apartment above his family’s home furnishings store. His father’s glass studio was out back.

It was only natural, then, that Josef would want his own family to live above the three properties he owned and worked out of on Dundas Street West at Golden Avenue.

He commissioned an architect to design the country home of his dreams. It was 4,000 square feet and had four bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus a sauna and two jacuzzis. It had a stone fireplace, a library, and oak hardwood floors throughout.

Josef designed a beautiful office space in the small library, complete with gleaming oak shelving and an oak desk. Standing guard was a knight with shield and sword. Its curved window was entirely stained glass.

“My dad had a European design sense. Natural materials, arches. He had art all over the house,” recalled his daughter, Cloe Joël Aigner, who write a book.

He commissioned an artist friend to decorate the European-style kitchen with her work. The dining room was anchored by a large oak table.

Behind the television area was the living room, and behind that was the kids’ playroom. Josef built the sauna off that area.

A large wooden deck and patio extended from the kitchen across the roofs of the garage area.

“The garage was massive. It was about the whole size of the apartment,” Cloe recalled.

The double garage housed heavy-duty equipment used for cutting large panes of glass and bevelling, along with a small forklift, heavy fusing machines, and racks and racks of glass and mirrors.

“This was the kids’ area,” Cloe said. Their friends all played there because Dundas Street was too busy for them to play on or near it.

When they weren’t on the roof, Cloe remembered buying jelly-filled, sugar-coated doughnuts from the bakery across the street. The family regularly shopped at the Polish delis on Roncesvalles Avenue.

Permeating many of these childhood memories was the smell of chocolate that enveloped the area. It came from the Hershey factory on the other side of the railway tracks at the end of Golden Avenue.