A Lasting Impression

Czech lighting brand Lasvit is reimagining botanical prints as sculptural freeze-frames crafted from Bohemian glass.

- Abigail Montanez

GLASSMAKING TRADITIONS IN northern Bohemia date back centuries, but Lasvit has figured out how to reinvent the craft in radically new ways. For the manufacturer’s Herbarium line—which encases twigs, shrubs and flowers in crystal—the designers didn’t have to look far for inspiration. The meadows and woodlands near its headquarters in Nový Bor, close to the Czech Republic’s northern border with Germany, provided everything it needed.

“During a workshop, we were asked by our director to come up with more floral motifs,” explains designer Štěpán Gudev, who’s credited with conceiving the Herbarium concept alongside colleagues Mária Čulenová-Hostinová and Petra Dicková. “I was part of the team that decided, rather than imitating nature, we should imprint it into the glass. It’s something that’s been done before, but, of course, we wanted to take it to the next level.” The prototype, he says, took just one day to create. “The brainstorming happened in the afternoon. The next morning, we gathered the resources and went to the hot shop.”

The process turned out to be quite simple. Molten glass is poured over native plants that Lasvit sources locally—a combination of thistles, conifers, rose hips and junipers—or a client’s own specimens. The flora, once ablaze, turn to ash and leave behind fossil-like impressions. The individual components are then strung together and suspended in the air, evoking both raindrops and falling leaves. “It’s poetic,” Gudev says. “One plant dies, but in a way, it’s being immortalised.”