As she stepped through a Valley of Hearts Delight portal, her fantasy would be anything but bland if the translucent material was imagined by Paul Estrade.

Estrade owns and operates Graystone Glassworks, on Graystone Lane, and he has been perfecting his trade for more than 15 years.

The words "ordinary" and "mass-produced" are not in Estrade's glasswork vocabulary or in his craft.

"He doesn't do production work. Everything he does is a unique and specialized piece of art which he creates," says Almaden's Kathy Wolfe.

Wolfe is not only an expert in glass—she taught glass art classes at San José State University where she also holds a masters degree in the art medium—she is also a client of Estrade's with two "really spectacular pieces" that he created for.

These "spectacular pieces," she says, are windows which she says are both functional and works of art.

"He's a true artist," Wolfe says.

Being an artist who finds mass-production unpalatable or boring, Estrade may have missed out on financial windfalls.

Doing their best to keep out the chill on a January morning, the doors to the workshop he describes as "modest" need a little help from a portable heater inside. Hanging just above the wood doors with the unexpected utilitarian glass are reminders of what could have made him a small fortune, he says.

Two square etched-stone clocks are all that are left from a batch he made and took to the San Jose Museum of Art. They sold like hotcakes in about two weeks, but Estrade never made more, though he says they were easy for him to make. Churning out cookie-cutter styles of clocks, or anything, is unappealing to his sense of style or adventure, he says.

What Estrade likes about his job is doing custom work; each job is different.

A custom 4-foot-by-4-foot wall sculpture mounted at the corners of the clear glass background is the kind of work Estrade says he would like to do more of. The piece is a centered block of orange anchoring three organic shapes of dark, bright blue meandering their way diagonally from one corner to the other.

"I would like to do more wall sculptures like this," he says.

Next to the wall sculpture is a display of custom glass accent tiles in a myriad of colors and styles, and he says they are just a sample of what he can and will do.

He'll create just about anything from glass, and he has. Pages of photos barely able to do justice to the magic he creates fill an album, and it's just a drop in the bucket of what he has actually done. There are photos of sidelights, shower stalls, wall sconces, neon-lit mirrors, tables, countertops, backsplashes, vanities, sink bowls, windows, room dividers and more. They are mostly glass, but sometimes granite or other stone and they are created by sandblasting, cutting, painting, gilding, slumping, silk-screening, or any other method that will achieve the look Estrade wants.

The designs are as varied as the pieces themselves. He's done everything from the very traditional to art deco, art nouveau, abstract, and whatever he and the client agree will work.

Estrade says he loves an artistic challenge, so when Dana Wright called him shortly after an open studio show in Santa Cruz, where she saw something that piqued her interest, he was happy to help her realize her vision.

"I have these wild ideas and he likes carrying them out," says Wright, who was already familiar with his work when she called him again last year. And it's his work that one notices first when walking up to the front door of Wright's downtown Campbell home.

An eye-catching sidelight with geometric rectangular shapes to the left of her eggplant-colored door sets the mood for the easy-going style inside.

One of the simpler pieces he placed in her home—a thick sheet of glass etched on the back—sits up just a bit off the countertop stretching the length of the cabinets in her office. It's attractive but plain compared to the repeated, but not identical, geometric shapes on the door that leads to her office.

Wright is not his only repeat client—of which he has many. She commissioned him to create a special piece for her remodeled kitchen that he installed just last week. Shaped almost like a grand piano, the piece is accented with small squares that are etched and painted on the backside, and subtly sprinkled about like the tail end of a party with the confetti raining down. They are mixed in among a few larger stretched-out serpent-like shapes that are also etched into the glass and painted in different iridescent colors. The one-of-a kind sculpture is suspended by four brushed-chrome cylinders above a new countertop.

Estrade designed it so that one of her existing pendant lights can poke down through this piece, casting light down while the eye travels up to his ceiling sculpture.

Though the small squares in the ceiling piece echo a pattern seen in other parts of the kitchen, namely the small squares on the cabinet drawer pulls and knobs, Wright and Estrade weren't concerned about making the piece match the kitchen design, Wright says.

"When we were deciding on the colors we realized it didn't matter because, ultimately, it's a piece of art," she says.

Estrade's kitchen duty didn't end there; he created a mirrored piece for the back of a large hutch and glass cabinet inserts for the hutch and other cabinets in the kitchen.

The hours of work Estrade and his assistant logged crawling in Wright's attic and climbing on her counter to get the ceiling piece installed—it took upwards of three hours—are nothing compared to the hours Estrade put into developing and creating the sculpture.

Wright's ceiling sculpture design took four to five hours alone, add to that a couple of hours for drawing out a template for the glass, the time it took to sandblast around the mask and then the painting.

"The part that's invisible is all that has gone on before the finished piece. All that has been done to gain the knowledge before that. All the broken pieces, the slumping that didn't work out. It's not a simple medium to work in," Wolfe says. "You have to have many, many years of experience. [That experience] is a huge plus when you're consigning someone to make a piece of art work."

But Estrade's work is his passion, and he says he wouldn't have it any other way. Estrade spent 12 years working in the wine industry before he decided to take on glasswork. Even then, he eased into it working part time at both jobs for a few years until he knew he could support his family—which includes a wife and two daughters— with his glassworks business.

His wife often has input in the design of pieces and every so often he likes to bring his girls into the studio for a craft day where they get to create their own soap dishes or something else that makes its way to the home display case. Aside from his wife's creative advice, he does all the work by hand himself, developing the majority of the designs on his own.

"About 75 percent of the designs come from my head," he says. The rest he gets from design books.

Most of his pieces find their way into Bay Area homes, basically from San Francisco to Carmel, he says.

"The bulk of my business is in high-end homes in places like Atherton," he says. "I did some work in a restored Victorian in Santa Cruz, and then there are some homes in Willow Glen."

And of course, Almaden Valley.

Most of his business comes from word of mouth, and he works with a number of local interior designers.

One Almaden resident, Roger Treager, remembers he found Estrade simply by driving from his home in the hills down the long, straight stretch of Graystone Lane before it curves toward Camden Avenue, where he saw Estrade's business sign hanging out.

Or not. Treager admits that after knowing Estrade for the last 11 years, that may not have been how they met. They could have been introduced by Bruce Watson, the Almaden cabinetmaker who did some work for Treager. Treager says he knows Watson and Estrade have worked their magic together often.

Either way, Treager loves the pieces Estrade has done for him. So much so that Treager and his wife keep inviting Estrade back to do more.

"Every little extra special thing we've done in this house, he's had a hand in it," Treager says.

It's hard to pin a style on Estrade—though he does have a couple favorites of his own—because he works diligently to create something he knows his customers will appreciate and enjoy. Turning Estrade loose seems to be a safe bet, according to his clients, those who have worked closely with him and those who know him as a neighbor.

"He's right in our neighborhood," Wolfe says. "He's a local treasure."

Paul Estrade can be reached by telephone at his office at 408.268.3418. Images of his work can be viewed at his website at www.graystoneglassworks.com.