Marquisate

While the name Marquisate nods to royalty, there’s an unmistakably irreverent street vibe in your work. How does this tension between nobility and rebellion play out on your design board?

We love the paradox between aristocracy and rebellion in Marquisate. If aristocracy is the memory of craftsmanship and form inherited from the past, rebellion is the courage to reinterpret that memory rather than accepting it as is. We love creating precisely at the intersection of these two worlds. On one side, the millennia-old elegance of glass; on the other, a free and somewhat rebellious spirit brought from the streets of today… The character of our designs stems from these two voices speaking at the same time.

One of you is an interior designer reading space and mood, the other an industrial designer pushing material limits. How do Çağkan and Güler’s minds meet when standing at the furnace?

Every design is a programmed emergence. We love seeing two different perspectives meet in the same material. At the head of the material, these two approaches blend into one another; sometimes one guides the other, and sometimes the glass speaks for its own. What emerges is actually a third language that neither of us could have designed alone.

We believe that glass is not merely a material, but something that traps energy and moments. Therefore, during production, we incorporate not only our hands into the process, but also our state of being; sometimes we play high-frequency music, leaving our excitement of that moment inside the glass. There is already an indescribable excitement at the head of the furnace. Even when we recreate a form we have produced countless times before, we are never certain that the outcome will be the same. The exact same design can confront us with a different character every single time.

Perhaps what excites us the most is precisely this: the possibility of something we do not yet know being born from within something we think we know.

Your designs carry a London-based perspective, yet their heart beats to the breath of master glassblowers in Istanbul. How do these two distinct city spirits blend in the studio?

London and Istanbul are not just two separate cities for us, but the meeting point of two different ways of thinking. Their common ground is their cosmopolitan nature; yet, they experience this in entirely different ways. London is a city that constantly reinvents itself by bringing different cultures of the world side by side. Istanbul has been doing this for centuries; it is one of the rare cities capable of making East and West, past and future, the refined and the chaotic converse in the very same sentence. Therefore, for us, the point is not to merge two cultures, but to draw our own language from within two worlds that are already intertwined.

What is the turning point where a piece stops being just “pretty and functional” and transforms into a “functional sculpture”?

Function gives life to an object; character leaves a story with it. We want a design to quietly take its place within everyday life while simultaneously changing our perspective, creating its own atmosphere in a space. Because we believe that certain objects exist not merely to be used, but to add a small surplus of meaning to our lives. In Marquisate designs, function mostly appears as a meticulously considered detail regarding the space to which the object belongs; that refined, premium sensation where craftsmanship, material, and contemporary interpretation unite transforms the very concept of function into a visible form.

Fusing Fabergé-level grandeur with pop-art irony in hot glass is quite bold. Where do you draw the confidence to break down and rebuild such iconic classical forms?

Marquisate’s Eggos love to flirt with Fabergé. The grandeur of Fabergé reminds us of the perfectionism of the past, while pop-art gives us the freedom to make fun of it. To us, the definitional direction between them is that the most sincere respect owed to the past is not to sanctify it, but to have the courage to converse with it. We handle the forms we bring to life with the fire of glass, leading perfection slightly astray.

In an era where mass production drains objects of soul, you focus on limited editions. What does it feel like to create pieces intended as “future heirlooms”?

In the age of mass production, preserving the soul of an object is almost a kind of romantic stubbornness. We design objects not just for today, but with the thought that they can pass through time. The idea that a piece can still carry a story belonging to its owner years later, or even outlive us, is fascinating to us. Because a true heritage is not an object kept in a showcase, but a story that multiplies in meaning as it changes hands. We want a design not to age by wearing out over time, but to mature gracefully with age… With every year touched, with every moment left inside, making it a little more of itself… Perhaps for us, permanence is not never changing, but rather not losing its value while changing.

Glass is an unpredictable material shaped by fire. What has been your most memorable “happy accident” when pulling a final piece out of the kiln?

The best part of glass is that it never fully obeys us. No matter how much you plan in front of the fire, the material has a will of its own. Sometimes, something even more beautiful than what we designed emerges precisely at the moment we lose control. We do not see those coincidences as mistakes, but as small interventions made by the glass upon the design. For instance, an accident in Mr. Eggo led to the birth of the Arc Bowl.

Your manifesto chooses “character over perfection.” In a world obsessed with flawlessness, what do those intentional imperfections mean to you?

Perhaps perfection is the most flawless state of the desire to appear flawless. A slight curve in the glass, a mark remaining on the surface, a form deviating by a few millimeters from what was planned are not mistakes for us, but the biography of the piece. We want the glass not only to be shaped, but to live. Generally, the last word is ours, but sometimes the most beautiful part of a design is that we could not put the final period on it. This is why we sometimes find the stubbornness of glass more valuable than our final word.

You operate on the motto “not frequent, just meaningful.” Beyond glass, what radical forms or unexpected materials are you looking to experiment with next?

We want to pursue yet-unexplored forms and possibilities. The collaboration on a one-of-a-kind furniture collection that we will realize with a world-renowned colorist is an exciting part of this quest. What will emerge from inside the egg already excites us.