12:56 PM EST on Sunday, November 28, 2004

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

Slideshow

Journal photo / Bob Thayer

A look at a couple's home and studio on Jamestown.

JAMESTOWN -- On sandaled feet, David Clancy steps through snow, striding toward his barn, where he and his wife Jennifer store summer for winter. Or so they say.

Come in. Hear their tale, their integration of art and work, science and nature, home and history.

We're talking earth, wind and fire. And we don't mean rhythm and blues.

Theirs is the story of creation. But before we get to its genesis, take cover. Suddenly, from somewhere, sniper fire erupts.

Ping! Pop! Ping! Ping!

Bullets ricochet about the barn. Incoming! Duck! your brain shouts.

Then, you remember something. Your brain, it's told you many far-fetched things before. And when you see Jennifer Clancy looking at you with raised eyebrows, that's exactly what she's telling you.

"Relax," she says. "You're perfectly safe."

Remnant hot glass quickly cools and cracks. It's something new around here: Clancy Designs.

The glassblowing studio and workshop has its grand opening this weekend. It's an event years in the making, involving incredible effort and aesthetics, one marriage and two dreams.

It was 1996.

David Clancy, 30, was driving, coming to the crest of a hill, the highest point in Jamestown. Then it happened. He saw a sign.

No, it wasn't some sort of omen, but an actual sign: For sale.

Behind it sat a small, disheveled, shingled cottage.

"It was literally falling in on itself," David Clancy said.

There was another sign, faded and nailed beside the building's front door: 1787, Miller's Cottage.

A windmill, one of only three in the state, towered behind the cottage, like a giant four-limbed silo, creating quaintness in the place, and a quixotic quest in Clancy.

"I knew that was it," he said. "I bought it without an inspection."

Why bother, Clancy figured. What would an inspector say? The building's bad, but the ground's still good.

The cottage, privately owned for decades, came with two acres. From it, Clancy could see Narragansett Bay, Newport Bridge and his future.

This, he thought, was the promised land, or at least his big break. For years the Portsmouth native had lived and worked in Providence, blowing glass for other artists. Now, he decided, it was time to set up his own shop.

However, his house came first. Construction began with demolition.

"It was like a can of worms," Clancy said. "One thing led to another."

With the help of friends and family, Clancy, with no applicable experience, gutted the structure, preserved the framing, salvaged floor boards and replaced everything else.

"There's nothing like being thrown into it," he said.

Clancy added insulation, bumped up the roof, punched out dormers and turned what was an attic into a second story. It all took time.

During that time, he slept in a "guest house" on the property, cleverly disguised as a tool shed with a window. Andy Shrake of East Dennis, Mass., built it and slept in it while restoring the 1787 windmill for the Jamestown Historical Society.

Jennifer Clancy, however, called it a "quaint shed." Eventually, she slept there, too.

"I missed the first three years of freezing cold winters," she said. "Damn!"

DAVID AND JENNIFER met and married in 1999. She was 27, on Christmas vacation, and visiting her family in Attleboro. She, too, was a glassblower. At the time, she was living and working in Australia. She had gone Down Under to meet a childhood pen pal after graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

At the Institute, Jennifer initially enrolled as a photography major. Then one day she saw the light, the molten glow of the glass department.

"I watched with awe the glass students," she said. "I'd say 'Wow! That's amazing!' and they'd say 'We haven't really started yet."'

During her vacation, Jennifer Clancy worked for a glassblower in Providence, a friend of David's, whom David happened to visit. Jennifer and David hit it off. Then Jennifer returned to Australia.

"When I went back," Jennifer said, "we both decided that wasn't so great."

So David Clancy took a two-week trip to Australia to see Jennifer. And they surprised each other. They married without a moment's notice.

Now Jennifer's in on the Jamestown project, with which she agrees entirely.

"It's a holistic approach," she said. "Where we live and where we work is who we are. We're not concrete slab people."

The Clancys are artists with an attitude -- to counter convention, yet incorporate themselves into the culture of a community.

"We're making something on this property again," David Clancy said. "It was once a gathering spot for the people on the island. You loaded up corn and went back to your house."

Now, the property produces glass. That, Jennifer Clancy said, is "in sync with the old world."

THE OUTSIDE of their house looks old, as you might imagine the original Miller's Cottage once looked -- simple, modest, traditional. Inside's another story.

Art and unorthodoxy are everywhere, not just for show, but for function.

The cathedral kitchen ceiling, spanned by salvaged barn beams from Maine, isn't gypsum but corrugated aluminum, offering texture and reflecting light.

"Why does everything have to be Sheetrock?" David Clancy said. "Can't people think of some other material?"

How about rough-cut board and batten wood, which warm and cover the walls?

The floor is Australian cypress. The sink backsplash is mosaic tile, which Jennifer Clancy made. The doorway into the living room is a Gothic arch, framed by brown and green mosaic tiles depicting ivy on stained glass.

Everyone's an individual, the Clancys said, but you wouldn't know that by looking in their homes.

"A lot of people are afraid to express themselves," Jennifer Clancy said.

"People buy things in Wal-Mart and Home Depot and everyone's house looks the same," David Clancy said. "We want to change that."

A mosaic tile ceiling border of ivy surrounds their living room, which features the cottage's original floor boards and fireplace mantel, on which is inscribed: "Happy is the miller who lives near the mill."

The wall separating the living room from the library is a collage of old wood. The balusters on the staircase are old, thick gnarled stems of blueberry bushes. The upstairs bedroom window looks out upon the Newport Bridge and the windmill.

"It's a good neighbor," David Clancy said. "It's quiet."

The windmill opens in summer. Visitors come.

"Sometimes you hear commotion outside," Jennifer Clancy said. "You look out the window and it's a wedding party."

In the bathroom, the Clancys' creativity shines.

A three-gallon green glass sink, lit from below, glows like an enormous emerald. Beside it sits a green glass soap dish in the shape of a fish, and a red glass lobster clutching his-and-hers toothbrushes, one in each claw.

The counter around the sink is made of rounded rocks sunk in cement, and covered with a layer of polyurethane.

"It's practical," Jennifer Clancy said. "It was hard to wipe the toothpaste out of the rocks."

The rock motif continues in the shower, which looks like a brook.

"This is going back to the Home Depot idea," David Clancy said. "Why do you have to buy a shower stall?"

Everywhere in a house, David Clancy said, homeowners should express themselves and ask a basic question: "Can you come up with something creative?"

AFTER EIGHT YEARS, the Clancys completed their house. Then it was time to work on their workshop, a post-and-beam barn they built about 100 feet away.

With help from family and friends, they made all their glassblowing equipment, their seeds of summer: a couple of reheating ovens, one cooling oven and one seemingly season-altering 2,000-degree furnace.

"People don't understand these temperatures. They bake cookies at 375," Jennifer Clancy said. When they see the glassblowing ovens, "They think, 'Oh my God, it's a volcano.' "

Outside, the temperature was in the upper 20s. Snow was on the ground. David and Jennifer Clancy walked to work.

She wore jeans and a tank top; he wore a T-shirt and shorts. They opened wide the barn's windows, and introduced early August to late November.

"It's always summer in here," David Clancy said.

"And in summer," Jennifer Clancy added, "It's like Phoenix."

The Clancys tag-teamed on glass. David breathed deep and blew, like Old Man Winter. Or, since this was about creation -- transforming a dollop of liquid glass into a solid and graceful vase -- maybe he was more like the description in Genesis of the Big Guy himself, "in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life . . . ."

Jennifer Clancy shaped and cut what her husband breathed. Visitors watched with awe, perhaps at the Clancys' idyllic marriage of home and work, artistry and community, but, more likely, their process that produces glass.

The Clancys welcome that.

"You get to see them get excited," Jennifer Clancy said. "And they have input."

A couple in the workshop observed the birth of a vase, and declared it theirs. The Clancys smiled, and approved.

People, they said, should celebrate originality, and put personality in the things they make, or merely buy, whether it's a carafe or a cottage.

"When you see something being made," David Clancy said, "you become a part of it."

Clancy Designs, 382 North Rd., Jamestown, is holding its grand opening through tomorrow, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Regular hours are Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.