Saint-Louis Quadrille Footed Tray, Black Marble

The Saint-Louis Quadrille Footed Tray, Black Marble pairs a hand-cut crystal foot — extracted by Mathieu Bassée from the Quadrille pedestal table design — with a slab of black marble as the serving surface. The tray is designed for tarts, cheeses, confections, or serving pieces, and the combination of the luminous crystal foot and the natural stone top expresses the material dialogue at the heart of the Quadrille collection.

Every crystal piece in the Quadrille collection is produced at the Cristallerie Saint-Louis in Lorraine, mouth-blown and hand-cut by artisans who apply Mathieu Bassée’s geometric, grid-like cuts to the Versailles vase profile — a process requiring both the glassblower’s precision in achieving the Versailles curves and the cutter’s skill in executing the contemporary Quadrille surface across them. The marble slabs — Carrara white, brown, and black — are carefully selected for quality and color, and the combination of hand-cut crystal and natural stone is assembled with the same attention to craft that characterizes all Saint-Louis decorative production.

The Quadrille collection was designed by Mathieu Bassée to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Versailles vase, Saint-Louis’s most celebrated archival form. Bassée took the Versailles’s curves and gave them a radically new surface: clear grid-like structures in place of the original’s classical flat-rib cuts, a geometric reinterpretation that reflects the light in an entirely different way. The collection’s name refers to the quadrille, the ballroom dance popular in the 19th century — the era when the Versailles vase first appeared at Saint-Louis — and the grid-like cuts echo both the dance’s geometric figures and the contemporary urban sensibility Bassée brought to the commission. The pedestal tables and footed trays extend the Quadrille beyond decoration: for the tables, Bassée inverted the large Quadrille vase and placed a heavy marble slab on top; for the trays, he extracted the crystal foot from the table design and paired it with a marble serving surface, capable of holding tarts, cheeses, or confections. Established in 1586, Saint-Louis stands as Europe’s oldest crystal manufacturer, holding the title of Royal Cristallerie since 1781.