Glass Storage Jars

Apothecary jars, made the slow way

An apothecary jar is a very simple object, which is exactly why the making shows. Our large jars are mouth-blown: a gatherer takes molten glass on the end of a pipe, and the body, shoulder and lip are formed by hand in one continuous piece. No mould, so no seam to find with a fingernail, and the wall thickness varies very slightly from one side to the other.

That variation is the bit people fall for. It is why the light moves across the glass instead of sitting flat on it.

The lids are ground to their own jars individually. A lid from one jar will usually sit on another, but it will not seat with the same soft, weighted click — which is why each jar leaves the factory with its own.

Getting the size right

The single most common mistake is buying too small. A jar that looks generous on your kitchen worktop, at arm’s length, reads as apologetic on a dressed table three metres away across a room.

A few honest rules of thumb:

• Standing on a shelf or a bathroom counter? Small is right. You want it to sit inside the space, not dominate it.
• On a party or wedding table? Go bigger than instinct says. This is the one everybody under-buys.
• Floor-standing, or in a shop window? As large as the range goes, and then one more.

Every listing gives exact heights and capacities — check those against the space you actually have before you commit, because photographs are famously bad liars about scale.

They outsell their name

We called them sweet jars because that is what people search for. Then we started reading the reviews.

Customers use them for bath salts, coffee beans, dried pasta, cotton wool, and — reliably, every summer — seashells collected over twenty years of holidays. Quite a few use them for nothing at all, because a well-made piece of clear glass is already an object.

For everyday kitchen use, the pressed pantry canister sets are the sensible choice: uniform, stackable, sealed for dry goods, and priced for a whole shelf rather than one statement piece. Not everything needs to be blown by hand, and we would rather tell you that than charge you for it.