A quiet studio, a diamond wheel, and thirty years of practice.
Raees Ahmed Merchant has been shaping glass at Krystal Kraft for the studio’s entire existence. What began as apprentice-level bottle cutting in the late nineties matured, over decades, into a body of work that anchors the studio’s artistic identity: the truck planters, the tricycle vessels, the sculptural centrepieces that get remembered and photographed and re-photographed in hotel lobbies, private homes, and design magazines.
His signature is the single-donor-bottle build — pieces where one whole bottle is transformed into a functional object without being combined with other bottles. Every one is uniquely numbered. Every one takes hours or sometimes days of careful cutting, edge finishing, glazing, and mounting. Every one is different because every donor bottle is different.
The pieces don’t exist in editions.
A Chivas Regal truck planter that leaves the studio is the only Chivas Regal truck planter of its exact configuration — the label placement, the tint, the natural embossing variation, the hand-mounted wheels. When it’s gone, it’s gone. This is why buyers keep them.
