Tiffany in Florida

The museum is arranged as a journey through Tiffany’s studio — from early decorative pieces to complete environments created by him and his team. The galleries include lamps, mosaics, jewelry, architectural elements, and reconstructed interiors such as the Tiffany Chapel and fragments from his Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall. Together they reveal the scale of Tiffany’s ambitions and the extraordinary skill of his studio.

The Tiffany Chapel was created by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago — completed just weeks before the opening. Inspired by Byzantine architecture, it combined marble, glass-and-gold mosaics, stained-glass windows, and one of the first electric chandeliers ever installed in a sacred space. After the exhibition, the chapel was moved several times and partially lost, until in 1959 the museum’s founders, Jeannette and Hugh McKean, began recovering its surviving fragments from Laurelton Hall, where it had been kept. By 1997, the restoration was complete: columns, arches, and the mosaic floor were reassembled from original materials. Today, the chapel’s lighting cycles through different stages, revealing the space as Tiffany intended — architecture made of light.

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After the Chicago World’s Fair, Tiffany built Laurelton Hall on Long Island — a house conceived as an extension of his artistic world. The eighty-four-room residence was surrounded by gardens, greenhouses, and terraces. For the first time, Tiffany could apply his ideas on an architectural scale: walls, furniture, lighting, and stained glass designed as one composition. After his death, the estate fell into disrepair and was largely destroyed by fire in 1957. That same year, the McKeans began collecting surviving fragments — columns, arches, stained glass, and furniture. Today, parts of Laurelton Hall have been reconstructed in the museum, offering a glimpse of what the lost house once looked like.

One of its most striking features was the Daffodil Terrace, a space linking the house to its gardens. Supported by eight marble columns with glass daffodil capitals designed around 1915, it blended structure and ornament into a single gesture. When Laurelton Hall was lost, the terrace survived only in part. At the museum it was reconstructed with near-archival precision — more than six hundred original pieces reassembled, with missing parts recreated by hand. Now it can be seen in a glass-enclosed gallery overlooking a courtyard, much like Tiffany envisioned over a century ago.

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Beyond Tiffany’s own work, the museum holds a significant collection of American decorative arts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition reflects how ideas of beauty were changing at the time — moving away from Victorian excess toward simpler, nature-based forms that highlight the qualities of each material.A special place belongs to iridescent glass, the innovation that brought Tiffany international recognition. Created by layering metallic oxides onto molten glass, it became the foundation of his signature Favrile style — glass that seems to hold light within itself.

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That Tiffany’s legacy found its home in Florida feels almost natural. His fascination with light and botanical forms resonates with how artists here continue to see nature — as a source of structure, rhythm, and color. The same motifs that inspired Tiffany still echo in the work of local glass and mixed-media artists, who reinterpret them through the lens of Florida’s landscape and light.