The chapel was Tiffany's statement piece, an 800-square-foot interior rendered in Byzantine-Romanesque style that pushed his art glass techniques to their limits. A marble and white glass altar sits before six carved arches supported by paired double columns on an elevated mosaic platform. The reredos behind the altar displays a pair of peacocks, ancient symbols of eternal life, set in Tiffany's signature Favrile glass mosaic. From the ceiling hangs a ten-by-eight-foot emerald glass chandelier in the shape of a cross, one of the first to use electric light. To the right, the baptistry holds a globe-shaped font on a hexagonal base, framed by the luminous "Field of Lilies" window. Every surface catches and transforms light: the windows depicting Christ Blessing the Evangelists and The Story of the Cross are built on what Tiffany called the mosaic system, layering colored glass to create depth without paint.

After the fair, the chapel was disassembled and stored. In 1898, collector Celia Whipple Wallace paid $50,000 to install it in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, then rising in Manhattan. Workers placed it in the basement crypt, intending to move it upstairs once the main church was complete. That never happened. When architect Ralph Adams Cram took over the project, he shifted the cathedral's style to Gothic, and the Tiffany chapel, with its Byzantine warmth, no longer fit the vision. It served as an active chapel for roughly twelve years, from 1899 to 1911, the only period in its existence when it functioned as intended. Then the choir above was completed, and the chapel was abandoned.

Tiffany himself reclaimed the chapel after 1916, restoring damaged elements and installing it in its own building on Laurelton Hall, his grand Long Island estate. After his death in 1933, the estate's fortunes declined. The Tiffany Foundation dismantled the chapel in 1949, selling off individual pieces to collectors. Then, in 1957, fire swept through Laurelton Hall's main building. The chapel's remaining fragments sat amid the ruins, destined for destruction. That they survived at all is thanks to two people: Jeannette G. and Hugh F. McKean, who arrived at the charred estate not to mourn but to salvage.

The McKeans came on behalf of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, recovering windows, architectural elements, and whatever chapel fragments they could reach. But they did not stop there. Over years, they tracked down pieces that had been sold off in 1949, repurchasing them from private collections so the chapel could be reassembled. The restoration was painstaking. Most of the original elements were recovered: the windows, columns, arches, decorative moldings, the altar floor, and most furnishings. Only the walls, ceilings, and nave floor had to be rebuilt, redesigned from descriptions of the Laurelton Hall installation. In April 1999, more than a century after it dazzled Chicago, the Tiffany Chapel opened again to the public. It now stands in a quiet museum on Park Avenue in Winter Park, a few miles north of Orlando, where the light still pours through Favrile glass exactly as Tiffany intended.