Interior Design - Portland, Oregon
The Glass House: Bringing Indoor Comforts to Outdoor Living
The Vision
It all started with a simple vision: slow mornings, coffee in hand, and the peace of sitting outside on comfortable furniture. Living in Portland, Oregon, where the weather can be unpredictable, that dream quickly turned into the desire for a covered outdoor space.
At Alana Spears Home, the philosophy has always been to bring the sunshine indoors. Yes—literally, by creating spaces that are light and bright—but also in the sense of making your home your happy place. The glass house turned that philosophy on its head, flipping the script from bringing sunshine indoors to bringing the comfort out.
That’s how the idea of the glass house was born: an outdoor living space that feels like a natural extension of the home.
The Design
The design was always about bringing the comforts of indoors outside. The challenge was that there wasn’t a traditional way to create a covered back deck that felt both functional and beautiful. What we did have, though, was space—and the most obvious spot was right outside our back door, where the garden had been.
Since both the garden and the deck needed to be reimagined, it became the logical location for the glass house. By modifying the existing deck, we could add stairs that led directly into the structure, keep it close to the house for easy access on rainy days, and solve a problem area that was already in need of repair.
The Execution
The hunt began for the perfect glass house—and that’s when the next challenge appeared. Every option I found seemed to use glass mixed with plastic, which simply wasn’t going to hold up in Oregon’s climate.
Then a friend introduced me to Versailles Gardens, an importer of LAMS glass houses from France—right here in Portland, Oregon! It was exactly what I had been searching for: beautiful, durable, and designed to last.
The installation itself was straightforward. The glass house arrived in a kit, delivered directly to the driveway. To prep the site, we dug out some dirt, added several layers of gravel, and set pavers in place. The key here is precision—the pavers must be 100% level, so having someone with meticulous attention to detail (and experience) is a must. Because we placed the structure right next to our home, running electricity into the glass house was simple and seamless.
For more details - see FAQ’s on our Glass House Addition service page.