Glass Blocks Are Making A Comeback

Mar 22, 2025

Consider this design revival before updating your bathroom.

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As with fashion or beauty, decorating trends are entirely personal. When matchy-matchy window treatments and wallpaper swung back into style, one crowd of design-lovers rejoiced while another groaned. The same can be said of an ‘80s architectural element that has recently been resurrected from the design dead: Glass blocks.

For some decorators, it’s a welcome reprise—and perhaps even an expected one. “The return of the ‘80s has been a part of fashion and design in the last few years: the colors, clean lines, and a feeling of home—everyone sitting around the table, playing games, and having a sidecar,” says Dallas designer Jena Salmon. “In design I always try to pull from all different times.”

Jena Salmon is an interior designer in Dallas.

Olivia Westbrooks is an interior designer in Atlanta. She also hosts Hallmark+'s "Home Is Where the Heart Is," which is available to stream on March 20.

Salmon says the design feature is a smart, win-win solution. “Glass blocks get a bad rap in my mind,” she says. “We all have glass showers nowadays. Not sure about you, but I don't really like being completely vulnerable all the time. That is where glass blocks are amazing: You still get light and the area feels open, but the privacy is there.” She’s currently working on a project in which she calls for glass blocks in the bathroom and sauna room. “I love how the light dances from behind the glass blocks,” says Salmon. “They look fabulous in a modern bathroom but also in a more traditional one.” Plus, she notes, they’re an affordable way to add another decorative and textural element in place of sheetrock.

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Of course, as with any trend, the glass blocks revival has its naysayers too.

Atlanta designer Olivia Westbrooks’s response, for instance, is tepid at best. “I’m starring in a television design show that’s all about nostalgia and reimagining the home’s unique interior architecture in new and fresh ways; however, this is one design element that I would prefer to leave in the past,” says the host of“Home Is Where The Heart Is,” which starts streaming March 20 on Hallmark+. “I’m not sure if it’s because glass blocks remind me of bad ‘80s movies. I can’t help but to imagine baggy suits and weird mullets whenever I see this architectural element. My take? Some things are better left in the design graveyard.”

Even so, there’s one interpretation that could warm Westbrooks to the idea: “Maybe if it were reimagined in pink, I’d consider it.”

So whether you’re all for the return of glass blocks or totally against it, let this be a reminder that all home design trends really do come back around again, so go ahead and decorate your house however the heck you please.