AO·04
2019 · Open edition, each numbered
Verrine
Nine hundred drawn rods falling in a single unbroken sheet.
Diameter860 mm
Lamping18 × G9, 2200K, dimming to 1.4%
From€41,200
Lyon · Quatrième génération
Light,
cut by hand
since 1934.
Eleven people work at 14 rue Sainte-Blandine. Between them they melt the glass, draw the rods, bend the brass cold, and pin roughly forty chandeliers a year. Nothing is finished anywhere else.
- 1,240 °C
- Day tank, melted on site
- 2200–2700K
- Nothing warmer leaves the door
- 18–40 wks
- From drawing to installation
AO·01 Comice — 214 cut pieces, in production since 1934
AO·04Verrine2019AO·01Comice1934AO·07Sainte-Blandine2023AO·05Sablier2020AO·06Halo Neuf2021AO·08Fougère2025AO·04Verrine2019AO·01Comice1934AO·07Sainte-Blandine2023AO·05Sablier2020AO·06Halo Neuf2021AO·08Fougère2025
What the house believes
“A chandelier at full output is a chandelier nobody wants to sit under.”
Séverine Ormelin — drawing office
The atelier has made the same first mistake as every crystal house: it once believed the job was to make glass sparkle. It is not. The job is to put a warm, low, uneven light into a room and to make the object producing it worth looking at when switched off.
So every fitting we specify dims below two per cent. Every metal we use patinas. Every rod is drawn by hand and therefore slightly wrong, which is what stops a hundred of them reading as a machine. And every piece is stamped with a number that will still bring it back to this building for repair in sixty years.
We will lacquer brass on request, and we will tell you once — politely, and only once — that we think it is a mistake.
The patterns
Six drawings, ninety-one years apart.
Read the drawing notes
AO·01
1934 · Continuous production since 1934
Comice
The house pattern, still cut to the 1934 drawings.
Diameter1,140 mm
Lamping24 × E14 candle, 2400K
From€96,500
AO·06
2021 · Edition of 9 per finish
Halo Neuf
Nine rings, one light source, and nothing else.
Diameter1,480 mm outer ring
Lamping1 × linear LED, 2700K, 96 CRI, dimming to 0.1%
From€28,400
AO·08
2025 · Made to order, extendable
Fougère
A branching structure that resolves into a fern only from underneath.
Diameter2,240 × 620 mm
Lamping31 × G4, 2200K, concealed in the spine
From€88,000
How a commission runs
- 01
The room, not the fitting
A first conversation about ceiling height, what the light has to do at eight in the evening, and what the room already has too much of. No drawings yet.
- 02
Drawn by hand, then measured
Séverine draws the pattern at quarter scale in pencil. Only once it is right on paper does anyone work out whether it can be built, which is the wrong order and produces better chandeliers.
- 03
Melted, drawn, cut, pinned
Glass out of the day tank at 1,240 °C. Rods drawn to length, pieces cut against card templates, brass bent cold over a wooden former. Between eighteen and forty weeks.
- 04
Hung by the people who made it
Two of the eleven travel with every piece and hang it themselves. They will also tell you, on site, if the ceiling rose is in the wrong place.
AO·05 Sablier — drop lengths transcribed from a 1961 tide table
Four things we are inflexible about
- Glass
- Lead-free crystal, melted on site in a 480 kg day tank at 1,240 °C. We buy sand from a single quarry in the Fontainebleau basin because the iron content is low and, more usefully, consistent.
- Metal
- Brass and silicon bronze only. Both patina, which is the point. We will lacquer on request and will tell you, once, that we think it is a mistake.
- Light
- Nothing above 2700K leaves the workshop. Every fitting is specified to dim below 2% because a chandelier at full output is a chandelier nobody wants to sit under.
- Repair
- Any piece the atelier has made, in any year, is repairable here. Send us the number stamped on the canopy. The 1934 originals come back roughly every fifteen years.
Ormelin makes the only chandeliers I have seen that look better switched off.
Halo Neuf is a ninety-year-old crystal house arguing with itself in public, and winning.
Nine months for a light fitting sounds absurd until you stand underneath one.
Enquiries
Tell us about the room.
Height, light, what hangs there now and what is wrong with it. Séverine reads commission enquiries on Tuesday mornings and answers every one herself.
Begin an enquiry