Crystal Glass Modern Clear Flower Vase

Look for cut panels rather than moulded ones, because a pressed imitation shows soft rounded ridges where a cut piece shows a sharp line you can feel. Check that the base is thick enough to stay put when the thing is full. Ask who made it and whether they will tell you exactly where the piece was formed and finished. Vagueness there usually means bad news.

Anything with a stem worth looking at, since the walls magnify whatever is standing in the water. Calla lily is the strongest choice, one stem, nothing else. Cherry blossom in the largest size gives you branching that the panels break into fragments. Delphinium and salvia both work if you want height. Forget-me-nots in the smallest size are almost comically good. Skip anything fluffy.

Three sizes exist and they bracket a useful range rather than stepping evenly through it. The largest measures five inches and is the one to buy if the piece has to hold a table on its own. The smallest is a shade under three and disappears happily onto a bathroom shelf. A middle size splits the difference for the undecided. Shelf depth matters more than height.

It does not keep water fresher in any chemical sense, but it makes you notice sooner when the water has turned, and noticing is most of the battle. Cloudiness that would hide inside ceramic is obvious behind a clear wall by day two. People who own glass tend to change water more often simply because the evidence is sitting in front of them. Visibility beats good intentions.

Every second day for most flowers, and daily for anything from the allium family, which fouls water faster than almost anything else you can cut. Tip the old water out completely rather than topping it up, since topping up just dilutes the problem. Rinse the interior with cold water while you are already standing at the sink with the tap running. Two minutes now saves Friday.

The largest size can anchor a console comfortably, though a dining table is a harder case: anything tall enough to be seen across the table is also tall enough to block the person opposite. Our advice is to run two or three of the smallest down the centre instead and let the panels do the work at eye level. Low and repeated beats tall and singular.

The Cube holds more, and by a clear margin, because a straight-sided container of the same nominal height simply has more usable volume than a tapered one. What the Crystal offers instead is presentation: the panels separate and repeat a stem so that three flowers read as six. Buy the Cube when capacity is the point. Buy this one for the trick.

It came out of our own studio in 2012, drawn by the same team that had spent the previous half year designing a terrarium and then quietly gave up on the lid. The inspiration, if it deserves that word, was a sealed glass box that turned out to be far more interesting once it was opened. That was not planned, and it happened on a windowsill over a single unsupervised weekend. Nobody wrote it down.