Photography by Powerhouse Studio and Alicia Dubuis. Images supplied by Maison Balzac.The first thing you notice about Le Verre is the stem. It’s a flat strip of amber glass, more like a bookmark than the thin stem you expect on a wine glass. Above it sits a clear, straight-sided bowl. Below it, a round foot that looks almost black at the edge. Once you’ve seen the glass, it’s easy to imagine someone drawing it in three strokes. Getting from the drawing to the dinner table took fifty years.
Australian industrial designer Denise Larcombe sketched the glass in 1976. She spent part of her career designing for Crown Corning, the Australian glass manufacturer, and her design archive now sits in the Powerhouse Collection. This particular sketch stayed on paper. According to Maison Balzac, the glassmakers Larcombe worked with at the time didn’t have the means to produce it.
Fifty years later, Larcombe returned to the design with Maison Balzac founder and creative director Elise Pioch Balzac. There’s a neat coincidence in the dates. The year Larcombe drew the glass was the year Pioch Balzac was born. The collaboration, presented as part of Powerhouse Made at Powerhouse Parramatta, gave them the chance to sit at the same table with the drawings and the glass itself.
In the photographs, there’s a ruler held against the bowl, colour samples laid over a drawing, and a finished glass sitting among the papers. It’s a good look at the small decisions behind an object that appears so simple. Turn it a little, and the flat stem almost disappears. Face it head-on, and that strip of amber becomes the whole thing.
There’s something satisfying about a design spending half a century on paper and ending up somewhere as ordinary as a dinner table. You can look up Larcombe’s work in an archive. You can also pour someone a drink and see whether they turn the glass in their hand.
Read the design story at Powerhouse · View Le Verre at Maison Balzac
In 1976, Australian industrial designer Denise Larcombe drew a wine glass that the glassmakers she worked with couldn’t produce. Fifty years later, Maison Balzac has brought it to the table.