On the 100-degree floor of a glassblowing studio in Brooklyn, the designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen stepped between piles of shards toward a glowing furnace. She peered through safety glasses at a translucent bowl taking shape in the heat.
It resembled a 17th-century glass goblet Jacobsen had seen at the Louvre Museum on a recent trip to Paris. She had a vision of the vessel — her take on it — as part of an elegant modern table setting.
Earlier, Jacobsen, 38, and her collaborator, the glass artist Adam Holtzinger, had sketched a diagram in chalk of the bowl. Now, as Jacobsen looked on, Holtzinger darted around the room, wielding a glowing blowpipe and working a molten orb into shape.
“It’s like surgery,” she said.
Did the curvature of the bowl work for her? Holtzinger wanted to know. It did. And what about the bubble effect — like a fizz of carbonation, achieved with the addition of baking soda — throughout? Also yes.
Jacobsen, a purveyor of elegant home wares, lighting and collectible pieces, is always on the hunt for references to make new.
Her influences include women known for an intimidating chicness — Elsa Peretti, the Tiffany & Company jewelry designer, and Andrée Putman, the French modernist interior designer, for starters. Her more whimsical pieces (the ruffled plate, the curlicue toast holder) reflect the work of Ettore Sottsass, the creator of Ultrafragola illuminated mirror, and Gustaf Westman, whose designs have proved eye-catching on social media.
Jacobsen started her business on the eve of the pandemic, when many looked at their surroundings and saw room for improvement. At the glassblowing studio the other day, Holtzinger drew her attention to a hairline crack in the piece he was working on. When it comes to glass, she has learned, it’s impossible to have total control.
It was a misshapen glass that served as the catalyst for Jacobsen’s breakthrough. In 2018, she had been working on a design project involving cylindrical glass objects that would hold homemade cleaning solutions for an exhibition that revolved around the theme of “chores.” When one vessel didn’t take its intended shape, the glassblower salvaged its base and handed it to Jacobsen.
For a while, she kept the piece on her shelf. The next year, she pulled it back down, drawing inspiration from it to create her popular Ripple Cup, which costs $60 per pair. She ordered a run of 1,000, and expected the stock to last years. It sold out in six months.
“I knew that this was perfect for the moment, that it was very on trend, that it was easy, digestible, fun,” she said.
On a recent afternoon, Jacobsen was making espresso in the bright, airy space where she lives and works on the Lower East Side. She set out a platter with twisted knots of babka from Elbow Bread, and a metal pitcher of water on a matching tray, each with sloping handles. Suspended from the high ceiling was a pendant light fixture, each bulb housed in a skirt of flame-colored glass. Jacobsen served the espresso in a perfect glass cup, its handle a neat curl.
They were, of course, all her designs. For visitors who drift in and out, that means her space occasionally doubles as a showroom. Members of her team drop by to plan new campaigns. Her friends, whom she invites over for dinner parties or just to lounge on her couch, simply enjoy being in her universe of taste.
“One of the things that attracted me to Sophie was this sense of glamour that I felt like was missing in my life,” said Jen Steele, a Brooklyn photographer and filmmaker who has shot images for Jacobsen’s brand for about five years. “She makes you feel things, and the objects make you feel things.”
Born in Seattle to French parents, Jacobsen grew up hosting mock tea parties, rearranging the furniture in her childhood bedroom and clipping images from teen publications or magazine ads for a martini-glass design contest held by Bombay Sapphire.
“It was always about building worlds,” she said. “I was always daydreaming about the person that I would later become.”
Before her senior year of high school, she relocated to Paris with her sister and their father, a philosopher and writer, and mother, then a physical therapist. From there, she matriculated at Central Saint Martins, a London arts and design college, where she was drawn to product design. After earning her degree, she worked with various design studios in London, including eyewear and furniture makers.
Over time, she began to pay attention to the buzz around New York’s design scene. She wrote to a studio with offices in Brooklyn and Seattle, Ladies & Gentlemen, and asked if there might be a place for her in New York. The company hired her as an assistant in 2015.
Jacobsen loves giving herself a challenging project, said Ian Veidenheimer, who roomed with her around this time in Downtown Brooklyn and now advises her business. It might be constructing a giant plywood dining table, which Jacobsen hacked together in their shared apartment in the space of a few hours. Or it might be engineering a shrimp tower for a “bacchanal-Coney-Island-themed” summer soiree — or planning a New Year’s Eve dance blowout that leaves the floor sticky with sloshed drinks.
“There’s almost an impish quality” to Jacobsen when she’s on a mission, Veidenheimer said.
In 2018, when she decided to strike out on her own, she funded the production costs of her fledgling business with wholesale orders of prototypes she brought to trade shows, along with some freelance work. (Though she received Small Business Administration loans, she said, she hasn’t taken traditional investments.)
Over time, Jacobsen built a distinct visual identity from collections of objects that both a “West Village girl” and an “Upper East Side mom” might covet. Many of her designs have even broader appeal, just right for anyone adding West Elm items to a wedding registry, said Jill Singer, co-editor in chief of Sight Unseen, an online design magazine, who worked with Jacobsen earlier in her career.
Spencer’s Spa, a high-end spa with a location in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, includes Jacobsen’s work on its mood-board-like social media page. Moss, a private club in Midtown, serves cocktails out of her glassware.
One drawback to a hit product like the Ripple Cup, Jacobsen said, is that “when something becomes a trend, it and you become shoe-boxed within this trend.”
As design trends have evolved in the years since, so too has Jacobsen’s sensibility. (More permanent is the squiggle tattoo near her wrist.) She has lately been mulling how to reconcile the sort of social-media-friendly crowd pleasers that helped make her name with designs that serve up something a bit more refined for an audience that is maturing along with her.
In the spring, at Salone del Mobile, the international design fair in Milan, she introduced a new collection of glassware inspired by disco. Fewer pieces show up in the light pinks and lavenders of her past designs: Understated coupe glasses and aperitivo bowls are dotted with delicate ellipses around their perimeters. A hefty ashtray ($85) and an enameled cigarette holder suggest adult pleasures.
Jacobsen has also been in the midst of a brand redesign, she said, overhauling the website and shooting fresh product photos. Looking ahead, she added, “I’m doing a little bit more with metal, and I’m slowly getting into textiles.”
There will be more glass, too. In Jacobsen’s eyes, the phases that a glass object goes through on its way to a final form tend to offer fresh blueprints. A glassblower’s job, she said at the studio, sometimes seems to be coaxing the material to “do things it doesn’t naturally do.” Seeing the shapes that the glass naturally takes, she said, “always gives me ideas for others.”
Holtzinger might be halfway through a given process when the intermediate form of the whirling molten glass might catch her eye. “That shape is amazing,” she might think. She’ll snap a photo, and save it for another time.
