Glass

Three furnaces, two of them still burning on Murano, sit behind this collection.

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La Soufflerie mouth-blows glass in Paris, one piece at a time, from recycled glass - wine glasses, carafes, vases - founded by Valentina and Sébastien Nobile. NasonMoretti has blown glass on Murano since 1923, and in 1955 became the first furnace on the island to win the Compasso d'Oro, Italy's highest design prize.

A smaller number of pieces are vintage: this collection includes a Barovier e Toso centrepiece plate from around 1960, in lattimo - the opaque white glass Angelo Barovier invented centuries ago to answer a problem the rest of Europe hadn't solved, a convincing stand-in for Chinese porcelain. Barovier e Toso's furnace traces its name to records from 1324, making it among the oldest continuously run glassworks anywhere.

What ties a contemporary Parisian workshop to a five-hundred-year-old Murano house is the same thing that ties every maker at The Leopard together: the glass is still shaped by breath and hand, not a mould running at scale.

Read our guides to spotting genuine Murano glass and reading hand-blown glass.

MAKER SPOTLIGHT

Fratelli Bonvini

Fratelli Bonvini has been a stationery shop and printworks on Via Tagliamento in Milan since 1909, kept just as it was by the typographers who took it over in 2014. Its archive of type, ornament and printing blocks now supplies notebooks, greeting cards and pencils, with covers by Milan illustrators and by Cabaret Typographie, the letterpress collective in residence at the shop. Exclusive to Australia.

Cabaret Typographie prints

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