The Table, Not the Chandelier

Murano made its name with chandeliers. The great furnaces of the island spent centuries producing them - vast, theatrical, dripping with light - and they became the thing Murano meant to the world. When NasonMoretti was founded in 1923, it made a different decision. It chose the table.

The wine glass. The water tumbler. The dessert bowl. Objects made for daily use rather than display, designed to be held and filled and washed and used again. It was, in the context of Murano, a quietly radical choice - and it is the reason that a set of NasonMoretti glasses on a table looks nothing like a glass made for a cabinet.

Ugo Nason founded the furnace in 1923, joined shortly after by Francesco Moretti, whose name completed the one the company still carries. The Nason family has run it continuously since - through a century in which Murano glass has gone in and out of fashion several times over, and in which the island's other great furnaces have, one by one, changed hands or closed. NasonMoretti is the only family-run Murano artisan enterprise to reach a hundred years intact. It is now carried on by Giorgio, Marco, and Piero Nason, the third generation to work in the same building on Calle Dietro Gli Orti.

The archive runs to more than ten thousand models. Among them: a set in black and red coral glass from 1930, the N.460, which was part of Gabriele D'Annunzio's personal collection and is now held at the Vittoriale. The Lidia bowls, which won the Compasso d'Oro in 1955 - the first time a Murano furnace had won the prize - and now sit in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York. The Gallone 236 from the 1960s, a mixing glass with an ice-stop edge along the lip, adopted by Harry's Bar in Venice as the vessel for its Bellinis. The Rep goblet, which became the official glass of the tables at the Quirinale, the residence of the Italian president.

These are not decorative achievements. They are evidence of a furnace that understood that the objects we use every day are the ones that accumulate the most meaning.

The technical obsession that distinguishes NasonMoretti is colour. The company is the only furnace in the world capable of producing thirty distinct shades of green - including the Green Soraya, named after a Persian princess known for the particular quality of her eyes. Colour at NasonMoretti is not applied to the surface of the glass. It is folded into the molten material at the moment the glass can take it, which means the colour lives inside the object, changes with the light, deepens at the base where the glass is thicker, lightens toward the rim. Each batch arrives a little differently. The furnace does not regard this as a problem to be solved.

The Borealis set - one of the pieces The Leopard carries - takes its name from the northern lights, for the way the colour seems to move as the light passes over it. The spiral that runs the full height of each piece is not decoration. It is the form. The glass is blown from molten cristallo at the end of an iron pipe, shaped by breath and eye, then the spiral is set on the diagonal before the glass cools. It catches the light differently from every angle. At the base, the colour pools.

Three colourways. A warm amber that deepens toward burnt honey. A smoky olive green drawn toward bronze. A cool violet that lightens at the rim. No two pieces are alike.

The Leopard stocks its NasonMoretti pieces exclusively in Australia.