Peony is a set of decorative glassware, vases and a bowl, that catch the light like hand-cut crystal. They are not cut. The whole pattern comes straight out of the mold, and that is the point of this decorative glassware, the richness of cut glass made far more economical, and doing something a hand-cutter would struggle to do at all.
The starting point
Cut crystal has a particular kind of sparkle, deep facets that break the light. It is also slow, expensive, and limited by what a hand can physically cut. I wanted that light-catching quality without those limits.
I built the pattern by studying traditional cut-glass work and drawing my own dense, slightly irregular version from it. The irregularity matters. A neat, repeating cut pattern is one thing, but this one shifts and overlaps in a way that would be genuinely hard to cut by hand. That complexity became an argument for a different method.
Proving it before committing
Molds are expensive, so I did not start there. First I had the pattern actually cut onto a sample, on a form close to the final one, to see the real light and depth in glass before spending anything on tooling. Once it looked right, the pattern was drawn for the mold and the tooling was made. The sample carried the risk, so the mold could be a decision instead of a gamble.
The method as the advantage
This is the part I care about. Instead of using a mold to imitate handwork, I used it to make something handwork could barely manage. The dense, irregular facets that would exhaust a cutter come out cleanly and identically every time, at a fraction of the cost, on every piece in the range. The mold is not a compromise on cut glass. It is what makes this particular pattern possible and affordable at once, which is the kind of thinking behind all my glassware and decorative glassware work.
Where it stands
Peony was made around 2016 and is still in production and on sale today. I still see it in stores. Honestly, I did not expect it to be received this well, a dense, quiet, textural pattern that turned out to have real staying power. For me that is the good surprise of it, a piece of production thinking that reads, on the shelf, as pure light.
Read the full design story on Behance.
Discover other product and glassware projects by Sinem Hallı.
Designer: Sinem Hallı, Award-winning Industrial Designer
Client: Paşabahçe