Saint-Louis Cadence Gold Rim Highball

The Saint-Louis Cadence Gold Rim Highball brings the Cadence collection’s meeting of horizontal and vertical cuts to a tall barware glass with the Cadence cut motif and a delicate 24-karat gold rim at the lip, suited to highball cocktails, sparkling water, and long drinks. The fine 24-karat gold rim, applied by hand with a brush, adds a quality of formal warmth that Charpin described as a pencil line running around the top of the glass — present, but never insistent. The regular pattern of lines enhances the brilliance and clarity of the clear crystal, and the form carries the modern, everyday sensibility that Pierre Charpin brought to the collection.

Every piece in the Cadence collection is mouth-blown and hand-cut at the Cristallerie Saint-Louis in Lorraine, France. The horizontal and vertical cuts that define the collection — horizontal cords with a bevelled cut and rounded bottom on the parisons, flat vertical ribs on the stems — are applied by hand in the cold atelier, demanding a level of precision that Charpin himself acknowledged: if any line deviates even slightly, the meeting of vertical and horizontal is immediately visible as off. The regularity and repetition of the cuts enhance the brilliance and clarity of the crystal, and their consistent execution across every form in the collection is a tribute to the virtuosity of Saint-Louis’s master cutters. The Gold Rim pieces add a fine 24-karat gold rim applied by hand, gilded with brush.

Cadence was designed by French visual artist Pierre Charpin and launched in 2022 as the most comprehensive new collection Saint-Louis had introduced in nearly five years, spanning tableware, barware, vases, bowls, a box, candlesticks, and a hurricane across 29 pieces. Charpin conceived the collection through drawing — always by hand — arriving at the motif of horizontal and vertical lines meeting in the crystal, a motif he describes as an interpretation of the gestural vocabulary of Saint-Louis’s artisans: the synchronized choreography of the glassblowers in the hot workshop, the variations of the crystal-cutting grammar in the cold atelier, repeated and passed down from one generation to the next. The Gold Rim versions add what Charpin described as ‘a pencil line running around the top of the glass’ — a thread of 24-karat gold that brings formal warmth to the collection’s otherwise everyday clarity. Charpin’s work is held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Established in 1586, Saint-Louis stands as Europe’s oldest crystal manufacturer, holding the title of Royal Cristallerie since 1781.