Craft Around the Country

Rachel Burnstein is the Queen of Bad Glass

Through collaborations and a steady focus on social media, the LA-based stained-glass artist has grown her pandemic hobby into a thriving business.

By Jacqueline Huynh Young
August 31, 2026

Digital Only

Glass

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Photo by Jacqueline Huynh Young

Rachel Burnstein works on stained-glass mirrors in her studio. Here, she wraps individual glass pieces with copper foil before locking them together with solder and a lead came border.

Rachel Burnstein lives and works out of a century-old Victorian home in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. The stained-glass artist has dubbed her house “The Pink Palace” for its bubblegum-pink siding and white gingerbread trim. Fittingly, an original stained-glass window spans the front facade. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she says.

Inside, the walls are covered floor-to-ceiling with art from friends and artists she admires. Tchotchkes and well-loved books crowd the shelves; even the light switch covers are personalized. It’s a warm, chaotic, maximalist home full of things collected or gifted over the years.

It’s also where Burnstein has built a business out of the wavy, psychedelic mirrors she crafts—one that has earned her nearly 50,000 Instagram followers since 2020. “I made an account called Bad Glass Shop,” she says. “I think I was just like, ‘This stuff is bad, and it’s glass. Maybe one day it will be good.’”

Photo by Jacqueline Huynh Young

Burnstein in her home studio in Alhambra, California, near Los Angeles.

With a formal background in textiles, Burnstein couldn’t have imagined ending up here. By the close of 2019, she was working three jobs across the city and had cycled through various others in the years previous. Lost and deeply burnt out, her therapist suggested she take some art classes to reconnect with herself, so she signed up for a stained glass course at Barnsdall Art Center. “As they say, the rest is history,” she laughs.

The growth from hobby to full-time business required an unglamorous digital hustle. She posted several times a week, commented on other glass artists’ work, and messaged strangers offering custom mirrors in exchange for a post. “I have no idea when I started blowing up,” she says. “It was like, okay, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000. Exciting. Scary.”

Scrolling through Bad Glass Shop’s grid reveals a riot of stained-glass color and pieces that are at once cheeky and joyful. Burnstein perfects the mirror selfie as her signature—waving back at her phone camera in the reflection, sometimes clad in the noise-cancelling headphones she uses while grinding glass, sometimes offering only a hand against a blue sky.

Her social-media audience has also brought Burnstein’s work to the attention of interior designers, including Elizabeth Iuliano of Elizabeth Design Co. “People love to say everything is ‘custom’ these days, but Rachel is truly creating pieces you can have fun with,” Iuliano says. “They bring this layered, unexpected quality that makes a space feel a little more personal and a little more special.”

Photo courtesy of Rachel Burnstein

Burnstein's hand and the blue sky often make appearances in photos of her work.

“It’s fun to collaborate. You kind of get lost in your own zone working alone, doing the same things.”

— Rachel Burnstein

Designers often come to Burnstein with a particular piece in mind, then work with her to adapt it for a space. “They’ll see something I’ve made and be like, ‘I love that, but in peachy colors, bigger, maybe more waves,’” she says. “It’s fun to collaborate. You kind of get lost in your own zone working alone, doing the same things.”

Iuliano hopes to incorporate Burnstein’s mirrors into the entry of a large waterfront home she’s designing, drawn in part to their versatility. “I love that these pieces of art can be vanity mirrors or collected together as a large-scale art piece,” she says.

Pieces from Burnstein’s collections generally range from $575 to $1000, while custom mirrors run higher. And despite growing interest from designers, Burnstein admits she could be more proactive about reaching out to those in the industry. “Send a postcard, do a little more networking,” she says. “That’s basically how it’s done.”

Photo courtesy of Rachel Burnstein

Crown Jewel Triptych, 2026, stained glass, mirror, lead, patina, 40 x 32 in.

Burnstein currently puts around 40 hours per week into her business, building collections for monthly drops, making custom mirrors for clients, and taking on corporate collaborations, including a recent partnership with Jim Beam.

She spends many of those hours in what would otherwise be the dining room, tucked between the living room and kitchen behind sliding pocket doors. A workbench faces the window, hung with some of her earliest stained glass pieces. Below that sits a vintage 1970s metal filing bin stuffed with paper patterns. Across the room, a wood shelf holds her glass collection, most of it sourced from Stained Glass Supplies in Pasadena.

For special pieces—such as personal projects or collections she feels particularly connected to—she splurges on Bullseye glass. “They’re one of the most expensive you can get, but it’s worth it,” she says, pulling out a fiery orange sheet swirled with midnight blue. “How do I cut into that? It’s so perfect.”

What she loves most, she reveals, is the back of the glass, where the color pools and whirls as it’s poured, leaving ridges and small dents that the front’s glossy finish smooths away. She pulls out another pane—this one a swampy mix of greens and browns and blacks—and runs her fingers across its textured surface. “Do you see the difference?” she asks, flipping it around.

Photo by Jacqueline Huynh Young

Burnstein retrieves a few of her favorite stained glass pieces from the studio shelf.

This fall brings a busy run of new work and appearances for Burnstein, including a stained-glass mirror class she’s teaching at Camp Glass in Spokane, Washington, a showing at Los Angeles Design Weekend, and a piece in LA gallery Object Permanence’s final show, where artists take on the funeral urn.

Her newest body of work draws on Medieval design. A series of mirrors with pointed arches hang in her back storage room alongside a collection she calls Badges of Protection—woven glass pieces that resemble shields and swords. Her signature wavy design reappears here, giving the pieces a melting, almost heraldic quality.

Among those pieces is Coat of Arms, a gridded work that weaves together two kinds of stained glass with strips of mirror. “There was something calling to me about weaving and self-reflection,” Burnstein says. “When I had the idea, I was thinking, ‘Who am I? Here I am. I’m one half of my mother and one half of my father. My relationship with them is so complicated, and I wanted to make a piece about us three. I felt like Coat of Arms was weaving information about who they are and who I am. In that piece, we’re all there. The dripping is symbolic of me moving out of them. We’re blended, but we’re separate.”

Photo courtesy of Rachel Burnstein

Coat of Arms, 2026, stained glass, mirror, lead, patina, 20 x 27 in.

Jacqueline Huynh Young is a Vietnamese American artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

Check out more of Rachel Burnstein's work online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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