You Call That a Vase?

Containers for blooms can stretch the imaginations of designers and florists alike.

May 7, 2019

Vases are vessels meant to hold cut flowers or other foliage. But they often work as decorative objects even when empty.

“What I think is appealing about a vase shape is it’s a little miniature piece of table architecture and really open to wild interpretation,” said Richard Wright, the Chicago-based auction house president and specialist in 20th- and 21st-century design. “I also think it’s the type of piece where a designer feels a lot of freedom. It doesn’t have to hold up a human being, it doesn’t have to bear a lot of weight, it just has to hold some water.” (And it doesn’t even have to do that.)

Andi Kovel and Justin Parker of Esque Studio in Portland, Ore., found freedom in blowing molten glass vases simultaneously and joining them before they cooled. At that point they continued blowing to puff up the size of the now double vase, which they call Pushmepullme. “The forming is a choreographed dance of fire, molten material and movement, and we both know our part of the dance to the point of pure instinct,” Ms. Kovel said.

Bari Ziperstein, of BZippy & Company in Los Angeles, said she was interested in vases that “look like miniature Brutalist monuments or architectural relics,” whether in use or not. Wyatt Little, a ceramic artist in Houston, makes vessels that resemble sneakers, old-school computers and even a dryer vent that was inspired by a trip to a hardware store. “I fell in love with its shape, texture and flexible nature.”

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, said vases historically had served as markers of wealth, industrial progress and cultural style. She cited Ettore Sottsass’s postmodern designs as “a great example of vases that represent a time, a movement and a consumer.” Ditto for Dutch Delftware and Native American black-ware pottery. “Vases quickly define the tools of our age through artistic expression,” she said. “They are loaded with much more than just flowers.”

Meet the Florist

A chat with the man behind New York’s Floresta.

Juan Carlo Bermudez — he goes by Carlo — is so rarely seen without a hat that he feels compelled to announce that he has hair. The third-generation member of a flower-growing family in Colombia, Mr. Bermudez, 50, runs his business, Floresta, out of a plain brick building in Long Island City, N.Y.

Floresta, which employs his niece and nephew, whom he is grooming to be the fourth generation, handles walk-in requests for birthday bouquets and million-dollar corporate events and weddings. A typical Floresta bouquet might have eucalyptus, berries, a succulent and an artichoke, or it might be an armload of fresh peonies tied with twine.

His flowers often come not from Colombia or the Netherlands, but Okinawa, where blossoms are packed precisely and the sweet peas “are super sweet and delicate,” he said.

For this assignment, faced with an odd lot of vases, he said his job was not to compete with them, but to flatter them. “They are the bride,” he said.

He noted the radical differences in styles. “It was east, west, north, south,” he said. But there were two he would buy.

One was Heath Ceramics’ tiny Box and Stopper vase with double openings. “The texture is nice. You can use it for one flower or three.”

He especially loved the little stopper, “like a perfume bottle.”

The other was BZippy & Company’s Tall Scallop vase, which can be turned upside down. “It’s simple,” he said. “With flowers, it looks nice either way.

“I like modern things. If I had the money, I would buy it.”