Vintage Crystal Champagne Coupes — Faceted Baluster Stem, Plain Bowls, Mid-Century

Four champagne coupes where all of the design is in the stem. The bowl is a shallow round dish, completely plain — no cutting, no etching, no gilding, no band. Beneath it, a moulded baluster cut into vertical panels swells into a ring of flat facets and steps down to a plain polished foot.

That is a deliberate idea rather than an economy. Put everything below the liquid and the drink becomes the decoration; the facets catch a candle and throw light up through the bowl from underneath. It is why a glass like this still looks modern seventy years on, when a heavily cut coupe of the same date reads as period.

Condition, stated up front: one of the four has a small flea bite on the rim — a tiny surface nick, not a chip you can catch a finger on, and invisible until you tilt the glass under a light. The other three are clean. One of those three has a seed bubble sitting in the glass itself, which I first mistook for a second nick — it is trapped air from the making, not damage, and it has been in there since the day the glass was blown. There are no cracks and nothing else wrong. All four are entirely usable and the set is priced accordingly.

Coupes are not only for champagne — this is the right glass for a daiquiri, a sidecar, or anything served up. And four is the number that does a dinner party.

Unmarked, as most stemware of this kind is — the maker’s name lived on a foil label. No maker is claimed.