Nebula Glass Modern Flower Vase

Check whether the seller shows the actual piece or a representative one, because metallic never lands twice the same way and the photograph is a fair indication rather than a promise. Look for pattern at more than one depth instead of a single flat band, and remember that a short round form gives that pattern more uninterrupted run than a tall narrow one does. Ask about wall thickness.

Short-stemmed and slightly loose things, cut low. Daisies, freesia, sweet peas and gomphrena all sit at the right height without competing with the wall, and five or six of them is the working number. Anything architectural fights the pattern and loses. Trim so the heads rest just above the rim rather than towering over it. Foliage on its own also works.

It measures 3.5 inches across and 3.5 inches tall, so it occupies a square of table roughly the size of a coffee cup and saucer. That suits a shelf, a bedside table or a windowsill without needing anything cleared first. It is short enough to sit in front of a picture frame rather than beside one. Height and width being equal, orientation is not a decision.

No better and no worse than any other glass, and the reason is worth knowing: the metallic is suspended inside the wall, so nothing decorative touches the water at all. Whatever the outside is doing, the surface in contact with the stems is plain glass throughout. There is no interior finish to break down and nothing leaching into the reservoir. Decoration and contact surface are separate things here.

Every two days, and set a reminder rather than trusting your eyes. A swirled wall makes the water level and its condition genuinely hard to read, which is the one real drawback of a decorated vessel, so this is a piece to clean on a schedule instead of on evidence. Cloudiness in a vessel like this arrives well before you notice it. Tip out completely, rinse, refill.

An entryway console, comfortably. A dining table is harder, because at 3.5 inches this reads as one of a group rather than as a centrepiece on its own, and a long table will swallow it. Put three along a console or one on a hall table beside keys and post. On a dining table, use two or three.

The Nebula, by a clear margin. It has a single open mouth and a rounded interior, so five or six low stems sit in it without argument. The Neutrino grips one stem at an angle, occasionally two, and that restriction is deliberate rather than a shortcoming. One is for a handful and the other for a gesture. Capacity is not what the Neutrino is selling.

The studio team, in 2015, and the shape came second to the surface. We wanted a form that gave suspended metallic the longest possible uninterrupted run, which ruled out anything with a shoulder, a waist or a neck to break the pattern. What survived was short, round and equal in both directions, which is exactly why the silhouette stays out of the pattern's way. The wall is the design.