Centerpiece

Crystal bowls and cups: artistic sculptures that enhance your interior

For Maison Daum, the crystal bowl and cup transcend mere utility: they become true interior sculptures, born from over 140 years of unique glassmaking expertise. Each piece, crafted from pâte de verre, embodies a subtle interplay of light, color, and transparency, transforming an everyday gesture into a poetic ritual.

Sculpted from the material, Daum bowls and cups seem to extend nature. Some bloom like a floral corolla, their pleated edges evoking the breath of a petal; others unfold like a fan, traversed by veins that guide the light from the rim to the base.

Each model translates a movement frozen in transparency: a Tulip crystal bowl opens its lip like a flower in full bloom; a Ginkgo bowl captures the vegetal freshness of the leaf; an Fleur de Paon Exotique bowl unfolds its shimmering colors like a fan-shaped plumage.

In an interior setting, these creations lend themselves to all kinds of displays:

• On a marble console, an amber bowl concentrates a golden halo that diffuses into the room.

• At the center of a round table, a midnight blue bowl becomes a focal point, holding a few fruits or petals.

• Placed on a shelf, a small purple bowl adds a colorful accent between books and design objects.

The rich and bold color harmony explores honeyed amber, celadon green, deep violet, ruby red, and sapphire blue. Satin finishes, polished areas, and fluid gradients create subtle contrasts that interact with daylight or the glow of a light fixture.

An ancestral glassmaking expertise, a legacy of the House of Daum

Behind every crystal bowl or cup lies a chain of meticulously precise movements. It all begins with modeling, then with the lost-wax casting process: a wax model is molded, then replaced with colored glass paste. Oxides give the pieces their unique hues, before the melting and annealing stages, lengthy steps that guarantee purity and the absence of stress.

After demolding, the workshop reveals the material through a "cold" process:

• Hand polishing to restore shine

• Satin or sandblasting to create a matte/glossy contrast

• Trimming and deburring to refine the lines

Sometimes, discreet metallic highlights are used to emphasize a rib or an edge.

This extremely demanding process explains the shifting transparencies, vibrant opalescence, and deep tonal variations characteristic of Daum pieces. The material seems to retain the memory of fire, time, and the craftsman's touch, lending each piece a timeless aura.

Based in Nancy, our factory draws inspiration from the Art Nouveau spirit and its artistic collaborations to transform decorative objects into living works of art. Since 1878, it has been the only crystal manufacturer in the world to fully master glass paste and elevate it to the status of a poetic language.

Choosing a Daum bowl is like welcoming a sculpture of light, shaped by centuries-old know-how and designed to last through the ages.