Art of glass
By deftly negotiating past and present, tradition and innovation, a mother and daughter duo is redefining Waterford’s 300-year-old glass-making history for a modern, extremely discerning, consumer, says Marie Kelly.
Ten years ago, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum housed an exhibition called What Is Luxury? It featured a variety of exceptional objects, each of which demonstrated an extraordinary investment in time and handcrafting. At the same time in Ireland’s oldest city, Waterford woman Anike Tyrrell was conducting her own exploration of the future of luxury.
She had recently established handmade crystal glassware company J Hill’s Standard and she too felt that the future of luxury was rooted in an investment in time – time to consider, time to collaborate, time to handcraft. She wanted to produce objects that would stand the test of time aesthetically, defy the ravages of time physically and have a value and context for any generation. As Anike explains, “We very much started with the premise that we would make a thing that would still look like an artefact if we dug it out of the garden in 500 years’ time.”
For her daughter Ava, a fashion and textiles graduate from the University of Limerick, luxury is also about time to pause and to appreciate. “When you sit down to have that glass of whiskey or wine at the end of the day, it’s a moment of peace and ritual. If you’re spending a bit of money on a whiskey or a wine, why would you pour it into something that has no resonance for you, no story, no connection? An artistic piece on the other hand becomes an important part of the ritual and it’s something you’ll have for a very long time, even if it’s only a single glass.”
The business was conceived in the wake of the closure of Waterford Crystal’s Dungarvan facility in 2009, where at one time more than 3,000 craftsmen were employed to make glass. J Hill’s Standard was initially envisioned as a place to teach and transfer skills from an aging generation to the next. “The skill base was exceptional and I wanted to keep that knowledge in the hands of local people,” explains Anike, who at the time was at the helm of Waterford’s County Enterprise Board, now the Local Enterprise Office, and had always had an interest in craft and making. She soon realised that the only way to finance any educational or training initiative was with a functioning business that created a demand for its glass, so she explains:“We started at the very, very extreme end of building a brand and thinking about what we should be.”
Named after 18th-century English glassmaker John Hill, who spent three years in Ireland pioneering his craft and passed on his unique formula, or ‘Standard’, for compounding glass, J Hill’s Standard launched in 2014 during Milan Design Week at the prestigious Rossana Orlandi Gallery. Ava describes their brand positioning as “that space of art and function”. “We felt the brand was going to have to take on a very clear visual language if it was going to work.” That visual language has been painstakingly developed over the past decade through a series of collaborations with contemporary design studios around the world, from their launch collection with Italian-born, London-based designer Martino Gamper and Amsterdam-based Scholten & Baijings to their more recent Hand Drawn Glass series with Irish illustrator Nigel Peake, who also works with luxury French fashion house Hermès.
While J Hill’s Standard is at the cutting edge (forgive the pun) of contemporary glassware design, it remains firmly rooted in tradition and if you were to walk into its new studio in Lismore, you’d be forgiven for thinking time had stood still. Housed in an old drapery store with an original double entrance – one for men and the other for women – left empty for 20 years, it is as Ava describes: “a real brand story space”. “You can bring people here and they understand what you do,” she explains.
Tongue-and-groove panelling, library shelves and a mantlepiece originally from British politician Lord Liverpool’s private study and a decorative wall panel made from a section of the original clay and waffle walls pay homage to the past, while curated displays of J Hill’s Standard glassware transport the space firmly into the here and now. It beautifully embodies the brand’s nuanced negotiation of past and present, of tradition and innovation. The collections themselves, though directional and art-gallery worthy, speak of the most humble aspects of Ireland’s culture and heritage. For his turf-cutting-inspired tumbler, Martino Gamper worked directly with the crystal, removing the material in a motion that echoes the gesture of the turf cutter to produce long, clean cuts with sharply defined angular edges.
Anike explains that there’s a lot of creative direction involved in each collaboration. “Just because a designer is brilliant doesn’t mean he or she can do the right thing. It’s great to have Ava as a sounding board,” she says. “I very much rely on her direction, her different point of view and her understanding. She was only 14 when we launched in Milan so she’s really grown up with the business and has had a lot of time to inform her aesthetic sensibility.” Ava agrees and adds, “But a collection doesn’t develop unless Mum has a very strong instinct that it is going in the right direction. The same dedication to craft and care for narrative has to be there.”
The mother-and-daughter team feel there’s a weariness with throwaway things that have no value and they rail against the word “newness”. “It seems to have taken over the globe,” says Anike. “We’re interested in mining what we have and giving it more depth and texture. We make in small batches with maximum concentration on beauty and functionality; it’s an antidote to the norm of making in thousands to be replaced and wasted.”
With this in mind, they plan to launch a textiles collection this year. “It’s a very conscious and intentional move, not away from glassware but to create something to accompany it,” explains Ava. And like its glassware, the collection of table runners, placemats and coasters will celebrate the hands that make them. “There’s very few people still handweaving in Ireland,” says Ava. “It’s very much a dying skill and an industry in need of help and exposure.” Mother and daughter are currently working with third-generation handweaver Mario Sierra at the iconic Mourne Textiles in Co Down; they have the final textile samples ready and are preparing for their first production run.
It’s exciting to have so many incredible makers creating beautiful things and really informing not just the Irish market but the international market too with this grown-up, sophisticated Irish design language.
The pair invests years in each collaborative project and Anike is not ashamed to say she “fan-girls” her chosen collaborators into submission. “I hunt them down until in the end they give up,” she explains laughing. I think Nigel Peake and I spoke for two or three years before we began working together and we met in Dublin, London and Paris.”. Then it takes an average of two years from conception to launch, “but sometimes it takes much longer,” Ava says. Given this kind of lead time, Anike and Ava both felt that a decade in, it was time to look for outside investment. “We bootstrapped the business up to now and that’s been stressful but also great because we’ve very much had free reign to follow our own creative direction,” Anike explains.
“You hear stories about women in the entrepreneurial space whose biggest mistake was not bringing someone in sooner, someone who is better at certain jobs than they are,” adds Ava. Software technology expert and Storm Technology CEO Karl Flannery invested in J Hill’s Standard last month and will help Anike and Ava grow the business without compromising its core values. “Karl is a lovely man, but he’s incredibly exacting too. He’s absolutely on board with how we’re doing things, but having someone from a different background is super helpful,” explains Anike. “Having meetings and reporting to someone else makes you focus.”
The US is a key market for J Hill’s Standard. “We have some amazing customers there,” says Anike. “They really get it.” The brand is also flourishing in Japan, Korea and the Middle East, but it’s growing here too. “In Ireland, that love of beautifully crafted objects, of functional art pieces, wasn’t really there when we started out,” explains Ava. “Japan has always been at the pinnacle of that, the desire for it and understanding of it, but we see it growing here now and it’s so exciting to have so many incredible makers creating beautiful things and really informing not just the Irish market but the international market too with this grown-up, sophisticated Irish design language.”
Anike agrees. “There’s a coming of age in terms of taste. The sixties, seventies and eighties were so grim in Ireland. There was a lot of economic hardship; when I came out of college, there were two jobs advertised in The Irish Times every Friday and that was it. People had more to bother them. Then we all went a bit bonkers in the nineties. But there’s a maturity coming now; people are travelling and seeing more beautiful things that are informing their artistic sensibilities. We have very loyal customers in Ireland and they get that we make fewer things but beautiful things.”
“They also understand that the brand comes from a very genuine and honest desire to preserve traditional skills and not allow that conversation to die,” adds Ava. Of course, this all comes at a price. “We’re aware of the cost and that it makes our pieces less accessible,” says Ava. “But it’s the only honest way to do it.” Anike agrees and adds: “Our glass is made to the highest standards of design, material quality and handmaking. That is the central theme that pulls each collection together. It’s what defines a J Hill’s Standard piece.”
Ava says she’s observed the really strong and honest reaction visitors to their studio in Lismore have to the product. “They always want to hold it and that for me defines a J Hill’s Standard piece; it’s that original, desirable, touchable thing.”
This article was originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, February 2025