Seguso Scavo Glass Lamp for Sarreid

Furniture company Sarreid Ltd. got its start sourcing materials from Spain and Italy and bringing the exceptional talents of European wood carvers, sculptors and painters to the forefront of American home decor. Its early products were animal-inspired decorative objects. Over time, the company expanded into side tables, coffee tables and its signature brass chests of drawers. 

In 1965, American founders Alex Sarrat and Walter Reid moved to Spain, where they established the furniture company. Sarreid Ltd. offered appealing design alternatives to Americans interested in owning imported and more traditional luxury goods. During the company’s expansion into Italy in the 1970s, Sarreid Ltd. produced its best-known furniture: the Brass Clad collection. This range of cabinets, trunks and nightstands are still highly coveted by collectors for their complete, solid brass coating, right down to the latches and nail heads.

Sarreid Ltd. later relocated to its current center of operations in Wilson, North Carolina, where it continues to expand its reach globally, including to Mexico, Thailand and China. As one of the first furniture companies to source materials from China, Sarreid Ltd. has explored many foreign domains ahead of most major manufacturers. 

The founders sold Sarreid Ltd. in 1985, but Sarratt repurchased it five years later with businessmen Charles Hoffman and Charles Mauze. Today, the company continues to produce high-quality, handcrafted furniture sourced from all over the world.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of tables, storage case pieces and more furniture and collectibles.

Members of the Seguso family have been leading figures in the manufacture of glass on the Venetian island of Murano since the late 1300s, but for most collectors of vintage design the name evokes two companies formed in the first half of the 20th century. Seguso Vetri d’Arte, born from a small consortium of master glass artisans that included Archimede Seguso (1909–99), thrived under the artistic directorship of Flavio Poli (1900–84), a designer with an eye for modern forms, color and pattern. Vetreria Archimede Seguso, meanwhile, was founded in 1946, when Seguso opened his own atelier in order to employ classical techniques in the making of modern glassware.

The owners of Seguso Vetri d’Arte were justly proud of their skills as craftsmen, but they were not worldly aesthetes — and they knew it. Poli had studied at the Art Institute of Venice, originally working in ceramics before switching mediums and taking up the art of glass. He introduced new simple forms to the genre — the best known of his designs being the Valva, which resembles a clamshell in profile — and employed several novel techniques such as corroso, which gives glass a rough, emery-board-like finish. Poli’s most collectible works are his sommerso pieces, made with a layering process in which clear and colored-glass vessels are “submerged” within one another, producing a kind of nesting-doll effect in striking, elegant vases with bands of separate and overlapped hues.

At his eponymous workshop, Archimede Seguso often favored highly decorative, age-old techniques employed with modern restraint. His layered-glass Losanghe vessels have the look of an abstract checkerboard while his free-form Merletto vases have delicate, lacy patterns created by painstakingly twisting two heated glass straws to create helixes around the walls of the piece.

Though different in their scope and mission, both of these furnaces bearing the Seguso name created some of the most beautiful, alluring and exquisitely crafted works in all of modern design.