František Jungvirt glass lamps shown at Wolf Villa near Prague

One of the brightest Czech glassblowers of our time, 30-year-old František Jungvirt, has released a full collection of his own lamps for the first time. He is showing it not in a classic city gallery but in the functionalist Wolf Villa in Čelákovice, as part of the Designblok festival, whose main theme this year is “Light”.

Jungvirt's coloured glass vases have decorated interiors in Czechia and abroad for many years. Now they are joined by a complete line of chandeliers and lamps. The maker had long thought about lamps of his own: whereas in the vases he played with the way glass catches daylight and the reflections around it, now the light source is hidden inside. Passing through coloured, cut glass, the light shapes itself and sets the desired mood.

Architects and designers nudged Jungvirt towards the experiment. “They had already worked with my vases in their projects and liked how they looked. They wanted to carry the same forms over to a larger scale and turn them straight into working lamps,” he says.

The new collection directly continues his three most popular vase series:

• Garden Basic — the clean lines of a minimalist series in soft earthy shades;
• Toy — a more playful line with wavy curves reminiscent of the fluidity of molten glass;
• Bloom — ruby glass in the shape of a heart, filling the interior with a warm, intimate light.

The craft and the signature style remain the same. Each lamp begins as hand-blown glass in wooden moulds, followed by hand grinding, matting or polishing to a deep shine. The finished glass piece is mounted on a custom-made metal fitting.

According to Jungvirt, the lamps are very flexible in use: they can be intimate “solitaires” above a bedside table or in a reading nook, or combine into a large cascading installation for hotel lobbies and commercial spaces. For the maker this is another step towards large turnkey architectural commissions.

A link to a functionalist icon

The choice of Wolf Villa in Čelákovice is no accident. The house, designed in the late 1930s by architects Jiří Štursa and Karel Janů for the manufacturer Josef Wolf, has long worked with Jungvirt. His vases have decorated its rooms since 2022, when the villa opened to the public after a major reconstruction.

“We did not want simply to restore the original look and preserve the villa in it. The space has huge potential to develop, and linking the interior with young artists was a natural choice for us. That is how we continue the legacy of Josef Wolf, who also believed in young authors,” explains Zuzana Kadlečková, curator and chair of the Wolf Villa society.

The installation can be seen in the villa from 7 to 31 October as part of regular guided tours with commentary. The new lamps will then move to Jungvirt's showroom PARVI Cibulka in Prague's Košíře, and in January 2027 they face an international premiere at the Maison & Objet fair in Paris.