Mouth Blown at Holmegaard: How Idéelle Glass Is Made

Every glass in Holmegaard's Idéelle range is mouth blown, a phrase that appears on countless product pages and is rarely explained. This piece looks at what the term actually means for the glass on your table: how thick the walls are, why no two pieces are quite identical, and why the red wine glass weighs twice as much as its siblings.

Per Lütken and the Idéelle range of 1978

Idéelle was designed by Per Lütken and dates back to 1978. Lütken joined Holmegaard in 1942 and stayed with the company until his death in 1998, which makes him the designer most closely tied to the Holmegaard name. Holmegaard describes him as one of its most advanced glassblowers. His designs tend to start from what molten glass wants to do when it is turned and inflated, rather than from a drawing imposed on the material.

That instinct is visible in Idéelle. The range showcases Lütken's enthusiasm for sweeping, feminine forms: bowls that swell and then draw in gently towards the rim, and a rounded edge where many modern glasses use a sharp, cut lip. It was conceived as a complete service, with glasses for different types of wine, water, champagne, brandy, aquavit and beer, in versions with and without a stem. Nearly five decades on, the shapes are still in production in clear glass, which says something about how little they depended on the fashions of 1978.

What mouth blown means in practice

A mouth blown glass begins as a gather of molten glass on the end of a blowpipe. The glassblower inflates it with breath, turns it continuously so gravity does not pull it out of shape, and forms the bowl, often inside a mould that sets the outer profile. The stem and foot are worked on while the glass is still hot, and the piece is then cooled slowly so that internal stresses do not crack it later. Machine pressed or machine blown glass follows the same basic physics, but with air pressure and timing set by equipment rather than by a person.

Three practical consequences follow from the hand process, and they are the ones worth understanding before you set a table with Idéelle.

Wall thickness

Because the bowl is inflated and turned by hand, the glass can be drawn out thin and even, and the rim does not need to be thickened for strength in the way pressed glass often is. On Idéelle this shows up as the soft, rounded edge Holmegaard highlights: the glass is finished so the lip feels smooth against the mouth instead of presenting a hard ridge. Thin walls also matter for wine. You see the colour of what is in the glass with less distortion, and the glass itself adds very little sense of mass when you lift it.

Small variations between pieces

No two mouth blown glasses are exactly the same. The height of a stem may differ by a fraction, the bowl may sit a touch differently on its foot, and you may occasionally find a tiny seed of air trapped in the glass. These are traces of the method, not faults. Set six Idéelle glasses in a row and they read as a matched set; look closely at one beside another and you can see that each was shaped individually. Many people who collect Holmegaard value exactly this, the quiet evidence that a person made the object.

Weight and balance

Weight in a mouth blown glass is distributed by the blower, and Lütken paid attention to where it sits. Holmegaard notes that the balance of the weight makes the glasses comfortable to hold. The listed weights are rounded to a tenth of a kilogram, so they are a guide rather than a precise measure, but they are telling: the white wine, champagne and dessert wine glasses are each given as 0.2 kg, while the larger red wine glass is given as 0.4 kg. The red wine glass carries a bigger bowl, a taller stem and a wider foot to keep it stable, and that extra glass is where the weight goes.

Four Idéelle stemware sizes side by side

The four stemmed glasses most people start with share the same family profile but differ in height, opening and volume. The figures below are as Holmegaard gives them.

Two details stand out. The champagne glass is almost as tall as the red wine glass but has the narrowest opening of the larger three, at Ø7 cm, which keeps the bubbles rising in a slim column. And the heights step down in clear intervals, so a full place setting reads as a graded group rather than a row of near duplicates.

Choosing and combining the glasses

The Idéelle Red Wine Glass 28 cl clear is the natural first purchase for most households. Its 28 cl bowl gives red wine room to breathe, and its extra weight makes it feel steady in the hand. If you drink mostly white wine, the Idéelle White Wine Glass 19 cl clear is the more useful everyday glass: at 17.5 cm it is noticeably lower, and the smaller 19 cl bowl suits wine served cool, poured in smaller measures and topped up more often.

The Idéelle Champagne Glass 23 cl clear completes a celebratory table, and because its height is close to that of the red wine glass, the two line up well when both are set at each place. The Idéelle Dessert Wine Glass 14 cl clear is the smallest of the four at 15.5 cm and 14 cl, sized for port, sweet wine or a short pour at the end of a meal. Placed in front of the larger glasses, it finishes the descending line of heights.

A practical approach is to buy the glass you will use every week first and add the others for the occasions you actually host. Because the range has stayed in production since 1978, adding to a set later is straightforward. If you are weighing Idéelle against Holmegaard's more casual stemware, our comparison Flow vs Idéelle: Which Holmegaard Glass for Daily Use sets the two side by side.

Living with mouth blown glass

Thin walls do not mean fragile in daily use, provided the glasses are treated sensibly. Holmegaard lists Idéelle as dishwasher safe at a maximum of 55°C on a glass programme. Place the glasses so they do not touch each other or the rack, since contact during the wash cycle is a more common cause of chips than heat. When washing by hand, hold the glass by the bowl rather than twisting it by the foot, and dry with a lint free cloth while the glass is still warm to avoid water marks.

Store the glasses upright rather than on their rims; the rounded edge is the most finely worked part of the glass. Over the years you may notice that each glass in your set has its own slight character, a stem a touch taller, a bowl a shade fuller. That is the method speaking, and it is the reason a mouth blown glass from a 1978 design still feels different in the hand from a machine made one.

To see Idéelle alongside the rest of Holmegaard's stemware, tumblers and carafes, browse the full Glassware collection.