Swarovski

We visited the Swarovski showroom at Wattens, Austria which is the headquarters of the Swarovski company. The building is inside a funny-looking 'face' landscape. There are fountains in front of the face and the water comes in spurts instead of a continuous flow, which makes for a nice effect of cascading individual drops, to remind you of crystals I suppose. Inside they have a museum kind of place, which then leads to the showroom. The museum was very good, and I wish I had been able to spend more time there. It was themed around crystals of course, but often quite tenuously. The displays were very creative with stuff all over the place. You can see the full set of photos here in a Yahoo album. Its worth a look. The two photos here are of a stylized (Christmas?) tree made of crystal, and an entire wall made of crystal.

The showroom was also very good with very imaginative and beautiful stuff. Necklaces and earrings are just the start with all kinds of stuff like showcase pieces, pencils (!) and so on.



We saw Swarovski showrooms everywhere, including Doha airport. Looks like they are very big worldwide. I do have some scepticism whether people make too much of the crystal and glass stuff and whether more or less the same thing can be made cheaply with modern technology. They're certainly very creative in the designs they come up with, so lets just assume that the crystal end of the business is also non-trivial. I hope the Swarovski craze catches on in India, and displaces some of the gold madness.

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We also visited a Murano glass showroom in Venice. Murano glass is supposed to be world famous and so on. Its not very clear to me what exactly crystal is and how its different from just glass. The Swarovski showroom didn't do anything to clear it up either, someone said that they keep their formula for making the crystal a close secret. Anyway the Murano showroom was also excellent, with beautiful pieces. We got a demonstration of a master glass blower making a handmade vase in front our eyes. It was pretty cool.





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A note on blogging: If you've been reading through all the posts about the trip, you might be wondering why I'm spending so much time and effort and chronicling minute details. Well, I've been wondering too :-). Especially after I've started this blog, I feel like I have to spill my guts about everything bloggable or I feel something is not complete. Its a bit strange. Blogging gets it out of my mind and then I can go on and do other stuff. In the case of this trip, there was so much squeezed into a short time, that blogging properly about it all is quite difficult and taking a lot of time. Its not always pleasant and Priya is also getting irritated. However it is a creative act with lots of fulfillment.