“There’s a lot to take in when you walk in here,” Juliana Maxwell says, looking from the delicate blue teardrops hanging from the ceiling to the Paul Bunyan-sized blown glass pint and french fries perching on the high shelves.
“Here” is Glasshaüs, the combination glassmaking studio/fine art gallery/event space/cafe founded by Juliana’s eldest son, Wyatt Maxwell, in Nashville’s Berry Hill. She owns and runs the Maxwell Gallery inside, down the hall from the cafe and across from the hot shop. In the hot shop, head of glass and resident artist Paul Nelson, along with Wyatt and other artists, will fire up the furnace to make molten, malleable glass — sometimes for classes, sometimes to make custom decor or gifts, often to blow, sculpt or cast art to go on display in the gallery or around the Glasshaüs.
On the way in, you might spy a display of Nelson’s quirky cups with glass-sculpted faces, or his colorful, large-scale wall platters — reminiscent of Dale Chihuly’s famed Persians,
but a little softer.
“He inspired everybody to put big, big bubbles on the wall,” Nelson says of Chihuly, laughing and shuffling back to tackle some of the day’s work.
A Handcrafted Blend
It’s a bit of a culture shock, taking 10 steps from the rugged work of glass craft into the clean white box of gallery display. (With a break for breakfast burritos, if you catch the cafe before the kitchen closes at 2:30.) That wide scope was entirely intentional.
Wyatt founded Glasshaüs to showcase the full, flexible breadth of glass work — grand-scale art pieces to simple stemless wine glasses, admiration to utilization, teachers to learners, hot to cold, start to finish.
He also built the Berry Hill hub to help inspire and house a Nashville chapter of the close-knit crew that tends to gather around this distinct, time-honored art form.
“It’s a really cool community,” Wyatt says. “There’s established people who are in the gallery who (also) do demos, and then there’s people completely new to glass, but they’re artists and they love it and they want to see more.”
Those who do want to see more — whether they’re collecting art, collecting knowledge or collecting experiences — get plenty of opportunities at Glasshaüs and the Maxwell Gallery.
In the gallery, art collectors and explorers get up close to work that spans an exhaustive range of styles, from abstract and contemporary art to realism and beyond. In 2024, Juliana brought in unique “knitted glass” pieces from Carol Milne, pop art from John Miller (who made the giant fries) and a whole lot more.
Outside the gallery’s doors, classes and events fill out a steady Glasshaüs calendar, from solo “1 Hour Intro to Glass Blowing” sessions to group experiences with food and drink packages. Month to month, the hot shop also hosts hands-on demonstrations from nationally known glass artists like Robert Burch and Dan Alexander.
“That is the game changer,” Juliana says, nodding to the interactive experiences broadly and to one of Alexander’s new pieces specifically. “Dan made this on Saturday, and people were so enthralled. They loved it and the whole process.”
Passing the Passion Down
Juliana raised her three boys, Wyatt included, with the love for art she absorbed from her own parents. They were ardent supporters of the art community back home in Loveland, Colorado, and ardent supporters of their daughter’s own creative pursuits. After earning a BFA in graphic design from Texas Christian University, Juliana built a career as an album
art designer.
Her husband, Joe Maxwell — a Vanderbilt MBA and “serial entrepreneur” — brought a refined business acumen to the family.
With that blended background of art and entrepreneurship, Wyatt turned glass art into a family business. He got into glass art through ceramics, and he soon developed a passion and a realization: There was a gap and an opportunity for glassmaking in Nashville.
Armed with a business degree from Belmont and a bit of tactical assistance from dad, Wyatt started exploring the idea of building a multifaceted glassmaking studio and community hub. And he knew the perfect person to run Glasshaüs’ in-house gallery.
“If she sets out to do something, she’s really good at operating and getting it done,” Wyatt says of his mom. “It’s super fun to work with her. And I mean, the gallery especially is fantastic. It’s selling lots and lots of work and exposing people to new work.”
If Juliana wasn’t a glass art expert before Glasshaüs opened, she certainly is now — a year and change later.
She knows the artists, their work and their process. She knows their families, their backstories and the intricacies of what inspires them to create. Importantly, she also knows how to articulate the complex, transmuting beauty of glass — a medium that reinvents its appeal with every shift in light or perspective.
“I love that in the morning, I look at this piece, and it’s one way,” Juliana says, gushing over one of Stephen Rolfe Powell’s large-scale blown-glass sculptures in the gallery. “And if you look at it in a different light, at the end of the day, it looks totally different. I just love the unexpected.”
