Around The Block

A hand-worked art glass perfume bottle by Anne Clifton, co-founder of Glass Manifesto studio and gallery in Tasmania, capturing a wildflower branch suspended in soft aquamarine glass with a faceted crystal stopper. Clifton trained originally in ceramics before crossing into glasswork, and that background shows in the layered, painterly surface she builds into each piece. A studio-glass object as much as a functional bottle.

Just in time for Thanksgiving: a Sabattini silver-plate serving pieces, a fork, ladle, pie server, and matching servers (sold separately), each one pure sculptural form. Sabattini was one of the defining figures of postwar Italian silver design, trained by Gio Ponti and later artistic director at Christofle before founding his own house. Your stuffing and pie deserve better than the everyday set.

Before safety matches, you carried a vesta case 🔥

This French c.1900 piece goes all in on Pan-Slavic style — dense enamel, gilt brass, a ring for your chatelaine.

It's a small object that asks to be picked up and turned over — the kind of craftsmanship that rewarded a closer look even when it lived in someone's pocket.

Venetian mask-making has survived centuries of fashion and politics because it's craft, not costume , and our current floor has a striking cross-section of that tradition.

The Sergio Boldrin plague doctor mask carries real history: that long beak was originally packed with herbs to filter the air, long before it became Carnevale's most recognisable silhouette.

The Atelier Marega Pierrot mask takes the opposite mood — its single painted tear is borrowed from the melancholy French clown and folded into Venetian tradition.

Bertolini Venezia's leather Medea mask draws on myth rather than theatre, while their blue octopus mask is the outlier of the group — a sculptural, contemporary piece that shows how far mask-makers still push the form.

Four different takes on the same craft, all on the floor now.

A dining set with a museum's worth of inspiration behind it.

Bolier's Rosenau collection is named for Schloss Rosenau, home to a Biedermeier design museum, and reworked here by designer Michael Vanderbyl in swirl mahogany with sapele inlay.

Table, two carvers, six side chairs, room to seat ten with the leaves in.

When a salt and pepper mill is so much more than a salt and pepper mill.

There's a workshop on Milan's Via Montenapoleone that has been grinding, shaping and fitting fine materials by hand since 1929. Lorenzi Milano started as a humble knife-grinding shop under founder Giovanni Lorenzi, and nearly a century later it's still a family business, now led by his grandson Mauro.

These salt and pepper mills show exactly why that lineage matters. The bodies are Iroko wood, hand polished with beeswax, fitted with tiled plates of Zebu horn so precisely matched they read almost like inlay work. Even the grinding mechanisms are considered, ceramic and steel, chosen to suit what each one holds.

It's the kind of piece that rewards a closer look.