Stained Glass Restorer Honors a Legacy
July 3, 2021
By Judith Doner Berne, Rockridge News Staff Writer
She’s the second person in the world, and the first woman, to receive a master’s degree in stained glass conservation from the Royal College of Art in London. She has interned at The Getty in Los Angeles and worked in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
But Ariana Makau, who describes herself as “proudly half-Californian, half-Kenyan,” chose Rockridge to raise her family, and Oakland as headquarters for her stained-glass creation, preservation, and restoration business — Nzilani Glass Conservation.
“We use a lot of old dental tools for the precision required to restore stained glass,” says Ariana Makau, founder of Nzilani Glass Conservation.
Nzilani, the company she founded and nurtured from a tiny one-room studio in Berkeley 20 years ago, now inhabits five spacious units in a West Oakland building dedicated to artists and small businesses that support the arts. She named it for her Kenyan grandmother, “to honor and amplify my grandmother’s legacy.”
But it was her Southern California grandfather, a carpenter and draftsman, who gave Makau her first toolkit around the age of seven, including “a hammer that fit my hand.” From there, it was a winding road to a career in stained glass conservation influenced by a life-long desire to contribute to the stability and longevity of meaningful objects.
She first came to Oakland for what was supposed to be a six-week housesitting stint for her father. “Twenty-plus years later I have a well-established stained glass conservation firm in West Oakland, and my family has been living in Rockridge for over 15 years. My father has since moved two blocks away, so we are a multigenerational family with Peralta and Claremont kids.”
During Covid, when we were forced to become homebodies, Makau experienced “a shift in our clientele from monumental buildings as in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to residential houses in Oakland and Piedmont. We’ve always done residential but not of the volume we’ve done in the last year” as many people devoted more attention to their homes, where they lived, worked, and studied.
Makau seems to find the same joy in these smaller, very local scenarios as she did from the 2018 California Preservation Design Award-winning repair of the two 45-foot high, 303-panel New and Old Testament windows in the iconic Grace Cathedral. Stained glass windows are assembled with strips of lead, she explained, and somewhere between 80-100 years in place the lead starts to fail. The Grace Cathedral windows, installed in 1931-32 and composed of 2,000 square feet of glass, took four years to remove, restore, clean, and replace.
“I take pleasure in being a woman business owner who can bring a diversely skilled team to preserve windows in “my backyard,’” Makau told me. The art glass she sees in vintage houses throughout Rockridge “adds so much quality to these homes and, often, there’s a story behind them.” Although sometimes it’s a repair made necessary by a stray football, more often the life of stained glass in these houses, built in the early twentieth century, is ebbing.
Particularly meaningful to her, she said, “was doing a small repair on a front door at St. Albert’s Priory after which I was given a tour of their beautiful stained-glass windows that line the chapel. It’s experiences like this that make it hard to consider living elsewhere.”
“We contacted Ariana after an incident of vandalism,” Fr. John told me as he, Fr. James, and I stood within the gates of the Priory, nestled within the row of homes lining Chabot Road. Someone had smashed an antique window closest to the lock on the front door of the chapel, built in 1940 but, luckily, didn’t gain entry.
Her Kenyan grandfather gave Ariana Makau her first toolkit around age seven, including “a hammer that fit my hand.”
“We were very pleased to find a local artist of her ability who was a member of our Rockridge community,” Fr. John said. Makau and her crew set up shop on the chapel lawn to make the repair and used antique glass from the Priory’s storerooms. “It’s always a joy to work with someone who has her ability and craftsmanship,” Father James added. They are hoping to reconnect with her for the renovation of the chapel windows.
Makau received a 2020 California Preservation Design Award for her company’s successful conservation of the 12-panel inverted stained-glass dome in the sanctuary of Resurrection Oakland Church, on Franklin and 17th Street in downtown Oakland. “At 118-years-old,” the award presenters said, “the dome was in a critical state of disrepair, requiring glass stabilization, re-leading, and the re-engineering of its structural support system.”
Top of mind for Makau in taking on these projects is the safety of the artists she trains and employs, and the contractors she hires. Among other measures, she has installed a heavy metal filtration system and requires extensive personal protection gear for handling hazardous materials. “Everyone in the core team is a certified lead and asbestos worker,” she told me. “We check people’s blood lead levels every six months and do annual respirator fit tests.”
She takes pleasure in making presentations to schoolchildren, most often at Peralta Elementary where her 10-year-old goes, and her 13-year-old, now at Claremont Middle School, also attended. A recurring theme is: “There are different ways to learn. You don’t have to have a master’s degree to be successful,” explaining that her employees come from different backgrounds and often learn on the job. “The only thing we can’t teach is curiosity.”
Married to Dylan Nolfi, a videographer “who can make anything,” Makau once told a real estate agent who suggested a house in another community, “I’d rather rent (which they were doing) than move out of Rockridge.” They enjoy eating at Filippo’s and “the Rockridge Library is one of the staples of our family.” She loves the sense of community at Peralta where “I’ve made lifelong friendships.”
“She’s a dear friend and a stand-up individual who I really respect,” said Jessica Waggoner, a neighbor and fellow Peralta parent. The two found common ground as female entrepreneurs. Waggoner, a principal in Maj Realty, had Makau speak to some of her colleagues since “we often do repairs in older homes. She’s so top of her game, so professional. I love her credo: ‘Be safe, have fun, do excellent work.’”
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