Not so long ago thought of as unfashionable domestic litter fit only to be enclosed in Granny's display cabinet & never to see the light of day coloured glass is making a interiors style comeback. 

Particularly dismissed was “Cranberry Glass”, that deep pink hued denizen of an elderly relatives Georgian style glazed mahogany showpiece smacked of Victoriana and Edwardiana but now it’s gift of light and colour is finding an audience with a younger fashionista. 

It’s origins go much further back than the reign of Britain's second longest serving and most irritated  Monarch.

The British museum has on display the Lycurgus Cup, a 4th C Roman masterpiece of glass making depicting the story of King Lycurgus attempts to kill Ambrosia, a follower of Bacchus, who in return turned into a vine and suffocated the enraged monarch…well who says wine won’t kill you. 

This cup is the finest known piece of early dichroic glass, which dependent on how light passes through it shows as green or cranberry, this is because the glass has floating “Colloidal” particles of Gold and silver, but it’s the gold that reflects the cranberry colour. 

The 10th C alchemist Abu Bakr al-Raz wrote down in Kitab al-Asra his preparation for Cranberry glass which was then lossed for centuries until the 17th Century Bohemian glassmaker Johann Kunckel inadvertently came across the process and from then it’s popularity grew through to the overwhelming proportions in the aspirational consumer society of Victorian Britain. 

The science of its production wasn’t truly understood until 1925 when, Hungarian Noble Price winner for Chemistry, Richard Adolf Zsigmondy got his very well trained brain around it and garnered a lot a appreciation for doing so. 

Cranberry glass fell into the unfashionableness that so much Victorian domestic decorative production did when collections from larger houses were dispersed to smaller and smaller houses until they became overwhelming, the three bed semi overflowing with Coloured glass, art nouveau ceramics and Victorian silver. 

Now a new generation of collector is coming through, a generation that was bought up with and respecting the restraints of post modern minimalism but wanting to bring in a bit of 19th C appreciation for colour, flair and space occupation to their domestic environment.

This generation is the new market for all those works of art unwanted by the previous generation and are now influencing new design trends incorporating those once passé artisan artworks.