Jordan Glass Modern Flower Vase

An oval vase is one whose opening runs longer in one direction than the other, so stems spread along an axis rather than gathering into a circle. This takes the idea further than most: it is wider than it is tall, three inches high and five and a half across, so the rim ends up doing the arranging. Stems rest on the edge. Nothing stands up straight.

It will, though the result looks different and it is worth knowing that before you order. Fresh stems are held partly by the water; remove the water and dried material keeps whatever angle it already had, which in a shallow oval means it splays wider and reads thin. Use noticeably more of it than you would fresh. Twice as much, roughly.

Not much, and the proportions explain why: three inches of depth over a broad footprint gives a wide shallow reservoir instead of a deep one. Fill it to the rim, because the water is part of what holds each stem at its angle. It also evaporates faster than a tall vessel does, the exposed surface being so large. Top it up every morning.

Because the wall has to change thickness within a single piece. A wide shallow bowl with no foot needs weight underneath or it slides on a table, and it needs a fine rim or the edge looks clumsy where stems cross it. Glass delivers both from one gather: heavy below, thin at the lip. A ceramic version would need a foot. That would ruin the line.

Yes, though you will spot them later than you would on clear stock, and that is worth knowing. On translucent white the mineral film builds as a dull haze rather than a hard ring, so it hides in the colour of the glass until it is fairly advanced. A rinse and a cloth take it off easily enough once noticed. Hold it up to a window monthly.

On a dining table, which is the one place most vases quietly fail. Three inches of height means nobody is conducting a conversation around it, and a modern table tends to be a long uninterrupted plane that wants breaking up without being blocked. Put it dead centre. On a sideboard it disappears against the depth of the surface. Tables are its room.

Start here if you buy flowers and with the Lantern if you buy objects. This is a working shape: low, wide, pale, meant to be filled and refilled and to stay out of the conversation entirely. The Lantern is blue and closed and holds views about what goes into it. One of them is infrastructure and the other is a decision. Buy the infrastructure first.

In 2012, the brief arrived as a number rather than as a shape: nothing on this table taller than four inches. That was the constraint Todd came back with after a dinner where the flowers had been in the way all evening and nobody could quite articulate why. What came out of it was three inches tall and a good deal wider than that. Constraints make better briefs than ideas.