Brokis

A Brokis light passes through the hands of more than thirty craftspeople, according to the company. Glass is melted at around 1400 degrees at the Janstejn glassworks in the Czech-Moravian highlands, then blown by teams of three to five, two gatherers, two blowers and a tender, before moving to cutting, grinding, polishing and waterjet work.

The glassworks has been blowing glass since 1809. Jan Rabell bought it in 1997 when it was struggling, re-equipped it with Italian-type furnaces, and created the Brokis brand in 2006 to give it a contemporary outlet. Today it supplies roughly half its output to Brokis and the rest to other clients.

Lucie Koldová designed the first collections in 2010, Balloons and Muffins with Dan Yeffet, and became art director in 2014. Boris Klimek spent two years developing Night Birds. Even the waste found a use: up to 30 per cent of each blown piece is discarded, and those coloured shards are refused into flat panels sold as BROKISGLASS, then cut by waterjet.

Artopia carries Brokis in Geneva. Czech hand-blown glass joined the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2023, which changes nothing about the object but places the skill behind it.