There was a stretch of about two years where this whole team was firmly anti tall vase. It came up in three separate house discussions and lost every time, mostly on the grounds that it’s a lot of vertical ambition for something that spends most of its life holding one stem of dried grass someone bought at a petrol station. That opinion has aged badly, and we’re willing to say so.
What changed it, honestly, wasn’t a design conversion, it was watching one survive a house move sitting on the floor of a moving van for four hours wedged between a rolled rug and a box of saucepans, and coming out the other end without so much as a chip. That’s when the stability question stops being theoretical. A tall vase with a narrow base and a heavy top is a liability near a hallway, near a toddler, near anyone who has ever gestured while telling a story. The good ones are weighted low, wider at the foot than you’d expect from looking at them, and they stand there like they’ve got somewhere to be and no intention of falling over on the way.
We’re still split on where they belong, though.
Half the group wants them on the floor, in a corner, doing the job a lamp usually does, filling a gap that would otherwise just sit there looking unfinished. The other half thinks that’s a waste of a good vase and insists they only earn their keep on a table, at eye level, where you actually see the thing and not just the top eight inches of dried honesty poking out of it.
Empty, they’re either sculptural or they’re a dust trap, and which one is true depends entirely on how often you’re honest with yourself about dusting.
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One of ours has stood empty on a windowsill for the better part of a year and looks, we think, genuinely better for it. Another got demoted to the airing cupboard after eight months of being resented for exactly the same reason. Same vase, different house, completely different verdict, which tells you this is less about the object than about how much visual noise a person can live with.
The one thing nobody on the team argues about is the price of getting the height wrong. Too tall for the room and it reads like it’s apologising for itself. Too short and it just looks like a vase that had ambitions and didn’t follow through. There is a genuine sweet spot, somewhere around knee to hip height depending on the room, and you feel it the second it’s right, the way a bookshelf suddenly looks finished when the last book goes in.
We’ve come round on the whole category, basically. Not without casualties. But round.
