Initial design ideations
I was walking, it was raining
A bed of tulips appeared to the side of me. And the way the rain was running down the petals, it looked like something out of a film. Fantasy, almost. Like you could reach down, pick the flower up, drink from it, and it would do something to you. Turn you into something. Give you something you did not have before.
I recalled a sentence I had once read that stayed with me.
“I once loved a flower so much that instead of picking it, I left it alone.”
That sentence became a martini glass.
Tulip Martini - Designed & Developed 2026
Not a martini glass inspired by a tulip. A martini glass where the glass and the flower are the same thing. Where the two forms coexist until you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
One side of the bowl is chrome-plated. Opaque. It curves and catches light the way a petal does. The other side borosilicate glass that nearly disappears into whatever is inside it. The stem tapers the way a real stem does, not the blunt geometry of standard stemware. Emerging from the ground.
Reflection and transparency.
The martini is already a vessel of seduction. The tulip is the international symbol of unconditional love. I didn’t invent that. I just noticed that they had always belonged together and nobody had built the object that said so.
They are sold only in even numbers. Two, four, six. Because seduction requires both a seducer and a seduced.
Further sketch development
This is what romance as method produces.
The love letter came first, I once loved a flower so much that instead of picking it, I left it alone. Everything in the object follows from that sentence. The opacity on one side. The transparency on the other. The stem. The sets of two. Not a single decision in the design contradicts the letter.
That is the method. Before the form is resolved, write the love letter the object is trying to send. Not a mood board. A letter completely committed to one idea. And if you cannot be brutally romantic about the direction, if the story feels thin or borrowed, go back. Something upstream is wrong.
The romance is diagnostic. It tells you whether the thing means enough to you. And if the thing does not mean enough to you, it will not mean enough to anyone else. You can finish it. You can ship it. But you cannot make someone feel something from a distance if you did not feel it yourself up close.
The romance is not decoration on the design. The romance is how you find the design.
The Tulip Martini is an object & product White Piano Group originated in house.
There is an analogy that keeps returning to me.
If you have ever received a handwritten letter from someone you know well, really received one, held it, read it, you will know that you hear their voice in it. Their speech pattern. Their specific way of landing a sentence. Their soul translates through the letter across whatever distance exists between you. A text message or email does not do this. But a letter, written with full attention toward one person, carries the person inside it.
That is what romance as method is reaching for. An object where the decision-making is felt, not just seen. Where someone on the other side of it receives something beyond the function. Where you hear the voice of whoever made it, even if you never know their name.
That is how you know the romance was real. It travelled.
