About five years ago online, I followed a bright-green glass candlestick. It took me to the website of a Paris glassblowing concern called La Soufflerie. I was in the process of immigrating to France — living between my boss’s on the Left Bank and my boyfriend’s on the Right Bank — and getting desperate to feel at home. Still following that pretty candleholder, I took the Mètro across town to the glassblower’s atelier — not realizing it had no storefront yet. Somebody let me in, though, and accepted cash for the pieces I pointed to on crude shelves.
In 2022, La Soufflerie opened a shop in the heart of town, on Rue de l’Odéon. Its glassware — recycled, mouth-blown, antique-esque, freckled by air bubbles — is also now stocked by such much-liked spots in the city as Merci, La Trésorerie, and the boutique at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, as well as by boutiques across Europe and the U.S. (plus Japan, Korea, Mexico, and the UAE). To say this another way: I keep seeing its goblets, carafes, vases, Champagne buckets, plates, and candleholders at places and among people with excellent taste.
At Candle Kids, for example, a gorgeous new coffee shop in Paris, I recently ordered an iced flat white and it came in a Venetian-style “Iced Tea” glass, the aesthetic of which I immediately recognized. Candle Kids is mostly using La Soufflerie. (The café has even hung up a still life by the painter Tianshu Zhang that features … that green candlestick.) My editor at the New York Times Styles desk (who, full disclosure, used to be an editor at the Strategist) picked one of La Soufflerie’s big vases and stuffed it with tulips for his sister’s birthday. My friend Catharine Dahm gave me a different grand vase of swirled clear-and-yellow glass.
“Is this La Soufflerie?” I asked her.
“Hey, how’d ya know?” she answered.
“When I first saw their things, I thought they were ancient Egyptian,” John Derian told me. Derian, who carries La Soufflerie at his shops in New York and Massachusetts, found the brand through his friends at Astier de Villatte. (Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli took the glassware under their wing at Maison&Objet.) Derian favors La Souff’s wide range of vases. “They really do fill a niche for all the flower lovers out there,” he said, adding that he reserves the bud vases for “the precious single-stemmed things I find in my garden” in Cape Cod.
Valentina and Sébastien Nobile — the married couple who co-founded La Soufflerie — started out doing four models of vases for florists in town. (Sébastien produces all of La Soufflerie’s prototypes, though he no longer blows glass for production. A mold-maker by trade, he teaches at Les Beaux-Arts and makes plasterworks for museums, hotels, and other clients as well as La Soufflerie. Valentina works on their terra-cotta and shop-made candles, composed of beeswax, soy, and grapeseed oil.) “I don’t think there was even a plan — we liked glass,” Valentina, whose father hails from Venice, a glassblowing capital, said.
“We wanted to make old shapes by hand,” Sébastien added.
The outfit has grown so much that they’ve relocated their Paris atelier to a bigger space in the burbs and opened workshops in Turkey and Tunisia too. La Soufflerie blowers work like artisans and not artists. The former have to be able to make the same thing “again and again — a hundred times, a thousand times,” Sébastien said. They do not have a design team. New collections, which are released about three times a year, are “just the things we wanted to make.”
My boyfriend became my husband, and we had a child and bought the apartment. The cupboard is full of random La Soufflerie drinking glasses. And when they break — as the green candlestick eventually did, twice — that’s life, and these are quotidian objets, after all. La Soufflerie’s glassware, this reminds me, is dishwasher-safe. Pro tip: Occasionally, put some lemon halves in the dishwasher with the pieces to brighten them up like new.
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