After about 15 years of working with glass and selling his artistic works at various galleries across the country, Scott Curry knows a lot about the medium. Curry Art Glass, owned by Scott Curry with wife Laura, has been making beautiful sconces, lumières, and many other glassworks. Yet when he got the chance to create glass blocks for the Lower Manhattan redevelopment project about a year ago, he knew he had ventured into new territory.

It took six weeks in a leased Port Orchard warehouse in what Curry described as a painstaking process that included several failures, just to develop the first unit. Glass is an unpredictable medium to begin with, but these cubes presented an added challenge: Curry chose borosilicate, a glass material mostly used for lab test tubes and other industrial applications.

“Every step of the way, the job has been arduous. You have to be always on top of it,” Curry said.

Although creating the cast pieces was far from an artistic experience — and after the first successful prototype pretty much turned into a production setting — Curry saw an opportunity: The borosilicate, although it doesn’t have a color system like the glass types used by artists, has great potential for architectural uses.

Dave Schoales joined Custom Cast Glass — a company created with his agent for the cubes project — in September, after working for glass master Dale Chihuly for five years. Together, Schoales and Curry have been experimenting with borosilicate to find potential innovative commercial and architectural applications. They are also working with Pennsylvania-based Kopp Glass, makers of items like railroad and airport lights, to create a color system for it.

“The beauty of doing something new is the challenge of figuring out something different and being successful with it,” Schoales said, adding that it works by trial and error: You have to produce an item several times to work out problems.

In mid-January, Curry and Schoales were busy experimenting with a chandelier installation, an idea that came out of a custom order for a Gig Harbor builder. Once again, Curry saw an opportunity — see whether the textured glass, suspended from ceiling with the help of copper arms, could find a niche in residential or commercial buildings. Laura Curry also works with the glass, though she also runs the management side of things.

With all the new opportunities, Curry is finding his companies going through growing pains. On one side, there is the unexplored world of commercial use — glass fountains, light installations, glass benches and much more — at a time when art glass is slowly saturating the market. On the other side, it’s the desire to not lose the artistic identity.

“It’s about trying to go the next level and stay ahead,” Curry said. “I don’t want to be a big production. I don’t want to lose the identity, but use it to do bigger projects.”

In a way, the blocks project propelled him to that level, but now that it’s complete, he is getting the chance to actually contemplate the options.

“By nature, we’re all appealed by glass. A lot of people are enamored by it — it’s a sensual medium. In a sense, I am desensitized after doing it for so long. But then you think you need a new life for it, and there’s growing pains,” he said. “It’s hard emotionally and physically. You’re inundated by all this change you imposed on yourself.”

Curry radiates passion when he talks about his fascination with glass and the art of turning it into unique objects. As he’s exploring the future of his business, there is no doubt he will build on that passion and the group’s combined talents to find a comfortable balance — with whatever next extraordinary idea they mold.