Water is the most humble of all drinks and the source of life itself. We wanted the bottle and brand design to be emblematic of a growing sensibility towards our natural habitat.
When we were approached by the Snåsa Water Source in the fall of 2014 there was only a wooden shed covering a pipe in the middle of a thick Norwegian forest. The brief was to create a new bottle design addressing a new sense of luxury.
The Snåsa municipality in south Trøndelag counts about 2.000 people surrounded by more than 2.500 lakes where the nomadic Sami culture have been living for centuries. The Sami are the only indigenous people of Scandinavia and their culture is based on a symbiotic relationship to nature.
We created a custom made bottle shape that is both archetypal and timeless; a vessel both reminiscent of the archaic shape of the nomadic tent, and inspired by the artisanal "in-calmo technique" based on uniting different shapes of coloured glass. The bottle becomes an integral part of the branding, concentrating the identity elements and colour coding on the conic neck.
The production technique of decorating the conic neck with organic spray colour and silk screen directly on the glass was achieved through a close collaboration with the glass factory, allowing for the bottles to be filled directly without any labelling. In an attempt to change the wording commonly used in the category we engaged the Norwegian novelist Joakim Kjørsvik in writing a poem about water. A passage of the poem is written on the back of each bottle.
The economy of colours, typography and design elements emphasises an austere but iconic expression and the combination of spray decor and silkscreen creates a vivid play of refractions on the base of the shape once the bottle is filled with water. The runic tree-looking symbol is a ligature of runic pictograms spelling SNÅSA.
The Sámi people are a Finno-Ugric people inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway and Sweden, northern parts of Finland, and the Murmansk Oblast of Russia.
The Sámi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders. Sámi ancestral lands are not well-defined. Traditionally, the Sámi have pursued a variety of livelihoods, including coastal fishing, fur trapping, and sheep herding. Their best-known means of livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding. Source
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Inspired by an artisanal glass technique of merging two shapes of coloured glass together (called incalmo) the object conveys both a contemporary and archaic formal language.
This is an ancient glass-making technique to make objects, consisiting of distinct parts joined after heat. The name, in Venetian dialect literally means “graft” as in joining two plarts. The name was giving on the first half of the twentieth century by the Venini factory on Murano, in Venice.
The glass artist blows two separate bubbles of glass, opens them and joins them together to form a single bubble. Aimed at obtaining multiple areas of different colours on the same surface, all the pieces are joined togeteher very accuarately andf finished as desidered. If necessary, the operation can be repeated over and over.
Source: Murano