No home bar is complete without stylish glassware, trays, and other accessories (like this leather-bound martini shaker, $295) to enhance your presentation and round out the mood of luxurious relaxation. Ralph Lauren has quite the collection of home accessory items for the kitchen or home bar that utilizes classics like crystal and stainless steel and modernizes them with the rugged and sophisticated masculine energy of leather accents. Serving trays, glassware, decanters, a lead crystal ice bucket with leather handle ... there's something for everybody. $195-$395
Champagne is always considered a fairly luxurious drink (even when it's the cheap stuff) but any champagne, cheap or not, is sure to get a class upgrade when it gets served in one of these two glasses. Valued at $400,000 and blinged out with 1,700 white and pink diamonds the glasses were chiseled out of 8kg blocks of rock quartz crystal and it took 5 jewelers 3 months to put them all together.
The seven deadly sins are now represented in wine glass form in a set created by Kacper Hamilton. Intended to "celebrate passion" and "encourage the user to be sinful in a theatrical fashion," each sin (wrath, greed, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, and lust) has its own artistic interpretation that will have you drinking your wine in the most interesting ways (the aggressive and dangerous looking pointed rim on the glass above represents wrath). The "Deadly Glasses" come all together in a set, packaged neatly in a velvet-lined mahogany case.
This past holiday weekend beer was the beverage of choice for a lot of people, and although an ice-cold brewski may seem at first glance like one of the most unassuming and simplest of alcoholic beverages the experts at Spiegelau have a different take. They've taken their combined 500 years of experience and created three distinct glasses made especially for bringing out the best in different kinds of beer. Their Beer Classics collection is geared for optimizing the appearance, aroma, taste, and finish of your favorite brew -- get a hold of these glasses and you could find yourself becoming quite the beer snob.
Don't take olives in your martini? Well then this is definitely not the glass for you, because this martini glass by to22 can't do without at least one olive. When designing this glass the thought was that "the olive has become the signature element of a martini, and yet it is treated almost as an afterthought." Now when to22 went to give the olive greater importance they weren't messing around! The olive is so important to a drink in this glass that you can't have one without it, literally. The olive is used to plug a hole in the bottom of the glass.
Great idea and I love it! But I will say this: this is not a glass I'll hold over my lap or walk around with...you know, just in case.
Bavarian glass maker Theresienthal's goblets and decanters have graced the tables of castles and palaces for centuries and it is easy to see why. These mouth blown cased crystal glasses are beautiful on their own, but dressed up with a patterned band of 24k gold, they become art. Even the bottom of the glass is given special attention, with a hand-carved sunburst pattern. Measuring four inches high, the glasses sell for $215 each and are available in six gorgeous jewel tones: tangerine, ruby, aquamarine, amethyst, emerald or amber.
Say the word "whimsy" and you've got my attention -- I love anything fun and slightly wacky, but not necessarily ridiculously over the top. These Wobble Cognac Glasses are great, I think, because they look interesting without sacrificing any class. They were designed with bouquet, temperature, and volume in mind, and the delicate shape is said to enhance the pleasure, deep color, and movement of the drink (and also the glass to some extent, obviously). Made of hand-blown glass and available in sets of two for $50.
If British designer Stuart Haygarth is a packrat he has certainly made it pay off. Haygarth, who is also a photographic illustrator, creates design projects that incorporate the collections of objects. Case in point, his Aladdin floor lighting. He collected different colored glassware from flea markets and junk shops and then grouped them by size and color. The four collections: amber, green, purple and clear are housed in lightbox vitrines like museum showcases, giving these cast offs a luxury appeal. They are limited editions and come in four separate sizes. Prices range from $7,800 to $13,000.
The InsideOut collection of Pyrex glass barware from AlissaMT take the classic shapes of various drinking glasses and re-imagines them through the use of negative space. All the glasses have the same outer shape but once you pour in a drink, the shape of the glass is revealed. Charles & Marie are selling the InsideOut champagne glasses this weekend. As they point out, the glassware has a unique feature, because your drink is protected from the heat of your hand, your bubbly stays chilled a little longer. A pair of the glasses sells for $60.
Created by Phillipe Starck for Baccarat, the Un Parfait Boxed Set is an exceptional collection of glassware. The set consists of six black goblets, each made from full-lead crystal. One of the goblets is perfect (un parfait) and is numbered and signed by Starck. Each of the others (cinq imparfaits) has a subtle, but purposeful, flaw and is inscribed with a quote from Jean Cocteau, "A l'impossible je suis tenu," which translates to "I am obliged to do the impossible." Price: $1,999.
These would make a fun hostess gift to bring to a party with a bottle of your favorite tipple. The set of six shot glasses is from Waterford and are engraved with six different words for cheers in six different languages. The set sells for $49 and is part of Waterford's lower priced Vintage Collection, a set of home basics for building your bar.
The attractive ornaments you see here are the 2006 offerings from Juliska, a company that makes handblown glassware in Czechoslovakia. The artisans create the glass using traditional techniques. These ornaments are are made of lead-free glass which has a composition that allows it to be blown very thin. They look a bit like sea urchins but I like the non-traditional designs. The silver-lined ornament sells for $75 and the clear glass ornament is $55.
If you're interested in glassware that will really make a statement, the Black Cut Crystal Glassware collection from Williams-Sonoma Home might be the perfect thing. To make the pattern, black crystal is layered over clear crystal, then gently cut away to create the unique, oval-banded pattern. It makes a stunning presentation of liquors, though red wines and red cocktails look particularly elegant against the black. Each piece in the set is sold separately, but the collection includes white and red wineglasses, champagne flutes, martini glasses, aperitif glasses, highballs and double old-fashioneds. Prices: $30-$38 for glasses; $150 for decanter, ice bucket.
I recently became aware of the Float Glassware collection when several new pieces drew my attention. The collection was designed by Todd Macallen and Stephanie Forsythe for Molo Design. Each piece is handmade of pyrex-type glass, making it resistant to both very hot and cold liquids. The glasses have an outerwall that suspends an inner cup, making any liquid appear to be floating in air. The above 28-oz. "animal soup" bowl ($119) features a small chicken that is raised above bottom of the bowl and appears to float above soups or snacks that are served in it.
More pieces from the collection are after the jump.
The gorgeous glassworks of Martin Kremer are incredibly complex. Kremer takes his inspiration from a variety of sources including intricately woven rugs, quilts and ethnic patterns. He also does architectural sculptures and wall hangings made of small glass quilt squares. This bowl is made of class that is cut, pieced, fused and slumped and is based on a traditional Navajo rug pattern and sells for $850.
