Glass in the Bedroom for Nude

How rethinking where a material belongs can open an entirely new product territory.

Product Designer

In the 2010s, a close friend of mine, then Design Director at Paşabahçe, told me about a new design-led brand they were developing: Nude. Paşabahçe was already one of the world's major glass manufacturers, so my first thought was not simply what object I could design for the new brand.

I began instead with the material. Glass was already deeply associated with kitchens, dining tables and living rooms. These were the places where people naturally expected to encounter it. I wanted to challenge that familiarity with a different question: Could glass become relevant in a room where it was not normally considered a primary material?

The bedroom became that territory. My role was to explore this through design and translate the idea into a coherent family of bedroom objects.

The project started by looking at the bedroom not through existing glass product categories, but through behaviours and rituals. What do people touch before sleeping and immediately after waking? What do they place beside the bed? What objects support dressing, preparation, storage and small personal routines?

From these observations, a family of possible products began to emerge: mirrors, glass hangers, jewellery holders, a bedside carafe and a bedside lamp. The objective was not to create decorative glass objects and simply place them in a bedroom. The material needed to earn its place through function and experience. Transparency, reflection, weight, delicacy and light became part of the design vocabulary.

Each product was developed in detail as part of the same material exploration. The mirror naturally used the reflective quality of glass, while the hangers questioned whether an object normally associated with wood, metal or plastic could acquire a completely different presence through transparency. The jewellery holders explored the relationship between precious personal objects and the material supporting them. The bedside carafe introduced glass into the intimate ritual of drinking water during the night, while the lamp used glass as both body and medium for controlling and expressing light.

Although their functions were different, the objects shared one central principle: glass should not appear as a stylistic addition. It needed to contribute something specific to the function or experience. The result was a coherent family rather than a collection of unrelated glass objects.

The project changed the question from "what other glass object can we make?" to "where else could our expertise in glass genuinely matter?" That shift was important. Materials and manufacturing capabilities often become associated with familiar categories simply because that is where we are used to seeing them. Design can question those assumptions and reveal uses that are already technically possible but culturally unexpected.

Glass in the Bedroom explored how an established industrial capability could enter a different part of everyday life without feeling forced or decorative. For Nude, the opportunity was not simply another object, but a broader context in which the qualities of glass could become relevant. Innovation does not always require new technology or an unfamiliar form. Sometimes it begins by looking differently at what a company already knows how to do.